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The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), like the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), has kept the faith in 3D in the face of flagging interest from both consumers and pay TV operators. To some extent broadcast owners and content owners have maintained some enthusiasm for 3D in spectacular events, but there is a danger that TV set makers will divert their focus on investment more towards new 2D display technologies involving frameless panels and variable sized pictures in ultra HD. Pay TV software vendors are pulling CE makers this way, such as NDS with its Surfaces technology designed to exploit flexible frameless displays.  
 
Against this background, the ITU has attempted to breathe fresh life into 3D with new recommendations for evaluating 3D TV image quality and depth, enabling viewers to adjust images for comfort. The proposals cover 3DTV program production and broadcasting in the two formats that are widely used right now, 720p and 1080i, as well as 1080p. The ITU has also published new interfaces for 3DTV program production, and a recommendation for the methods to evaluate the quality of 3DTV images, which relates to three aspects, or quality factors - picture quality, depth, and comfort levels.  
 
To an extent the ITU overshadowed its own 3D efforts by coming out with new standards for UHDTV (Ultra High Definition TV) at the same time. Although this is further off than 3D, awareness of the potential has been raised by demonstrations at various trade shows, and has generated increasing interest. The ITU has decided to cover both 4K and 8K under the ultra HD banner, in multiples of the existing 1080p standard, which is only beginning to succeed 720p and 1080i. The result is that variants such as Quad Full HD (QFHD, or 3840x2160 resolution) and Digital Cinema 4K resolution (4096x2160) both fall under the ambit of 4K. 8K doubles up again in each dimension to resolution 7680x4320 high, which is 16 times greater in spatial resolution than 1080p.  
 
Naturally the implications for bandwidth of 4K and particularly 8K, have created some alarm, given that an 8K program running at the maximum allowed 120 frames per second would require 320 times the bit rate of many current 720p or 1080i HD transmissions. This has stimulated efforts to develop a new generation compression technology beyond MPEG-4/H.264. One of these is a French project starting this week, involving development of an encoding scheme for ultra HD services, aiming to cut bandwidth by a further factor of two above H.264. This project, called 4EVER, involves a consortium including France Telecom’s Orange Labs, the Télécom ParisTech and INSA-IETR University labs, transcoding vendor ATEME, and state broadcaster France Télévisions, as well as GlobeCast, TeamCast, Technicolor and Doremi. The objective is to apply High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) for encoding ultra HD, while adding extra features to improve efficiency of other aspects of the end to end transmission chain from contribution to final consumption.  
 
HEVC already exists, or almost, having been developed as the intended successor to H.264 by ISO/MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group) and the ITU-T/ VCEG (Video Coding Experts Group). It is currently in draft stage, with final ratification as an international standard slated for January 2013. It exploits the greater bang per buck in computational power available now compared with when H.264 came along, improving the tradeoff between encoding complexity, compression rate, transmission robustness, bandwidth, and video quality.  
 
The improved rate of compression is expected to be about on a par with what H.264/MPEG4 itself achieved over the preceding MPEG2 standard, and we can assume that the 4EVER consortium aims to improve on that further through other measures, although it has not specified what these are.  
 
A key starting point for this 4EVER project could be EAVC4, the latest release of ATEME’s H.264 video encoding platform, which we wrote about last week. EAVC4 is designed to provide a technical foundation for HEVC, using a new patented technique called “Multi-Screen by Design.” This exploits a form of software parallelization to perform common processes just once for all bit-rates, to reduce the overall number of steps needed to encode video for output in multiple formats. 

Courtesy Rethink Research