As a lifelong fan of the Chicago Bears it was with great anticipation that I watch this past Super Bowl. I doubted their chances, seemed like the Colts were destined, but nonetheless it was a chance to recall good times from my college days when the Bears last took the title.
Today’s television technology is far superior to that of 1985 and I gathered with friends to watch the game in HD on a relatively new HDTV. It was interesting to watch as everybody just waxed about how great the picture quality was. Being in the field of video compression, I offered a more scrutinizing eye. Keep in mind its difficult to take a contrarian position with someone who spent thousands on a HDTV and hundreds on a subscription to the HD channels.
Okay, the visual wasn’t bad…but it wasn’t outstanding. As a recent attendee of CES, I’ve seen much better. I have recently read that this is a major issue with many electronics retailers today…that being the complaint and support calls for HDTVs.
So what’s going on?
From my experience, I think we are seeing a few things in play. I had a very interesting conversation with a gentlemen from DirectTV at the CES show. I got a lot of insight into both the technology and process required to deliver content over the “last mile”. Basically the same infrastructure has been in place for most of the past decade and compromises need to be made to accomodate all the new content and the desire for HD content.
One big difference is the size, quality and availability of today’s displays. It was one thing to see video content on a 36″ television, but now we are talking about 48″, 52″ and 60″ being practical and reasonably priced. Also consider that most content is being delivered in either MPEG2 or MPEG4 formats, both of which were conceived and primarily developed for constraints that are no longer prevalent. When you throw an MPEG2 signal on a 60″ display the compression artifacts are going to be evident.
But isn’t bandwidth still the issue?
Yes it is and that still seems to be the crux of the problem. The pipes are getting fatter, but we’re demanding more and more content and more HD content. Any extra bandwidth fills up real quick. When that happens, then more compression is applied and the visual result begins to suffer. As told to me, the content providers are trying to delivery HD content under a data rate of 20 Mbps and often ratchet that down to 10 Mbps. HD content at 10 Mbps will show noticable degradation to even the untrained eye.
Are sporting events even more of a challenge?
Yes, they are and here’s why. The MPEG formats use temporal compression techniques, also known as interframe compression. In the most basic sense, the encoder looks for redundancies that exist amongst sequential frames of video. By removing this redundant content you can achieve far greater compression. Since sporting events have a lot of moving action, a shimmering background of fans and multiple cameras in use, the ability to find redundancies is greatly diminished. If you’re still targeting the same bit rate, then you achieve the target compression by greatly reducing the quality of the video content through spatial or single frame compression. I suspect this is what I was seeing last Sunday.
Okay JPEG2000 gurus, what role might that play in solving this problem?
Good question…I think the jury is still out on this. JPEG2000 will never achieve the same data rates as that of MPEG2, MPEG4 or H.264 in most circumstances. Add to the fact that there is an entire infrastrucure built around those standards…tough to change overnight. But I see three things that might greatly influence whether JPEG2000 makes it into your home, they are:
IPTV - if the on-demand pull model over IP becomes prevalent, then the bandwidth issues are greatly diminished since delivering 400 channels is replaced with only a few high quality streams that you select. There’s a lot of traction for JPEG2000 in these circles as evident by the recent SMPTE meeting for IPTV.
Digital Cinema - here me out on this, the movie industry would love an “author once, deliver to many” model by which to control their content. This would potentially remove a lot of intermediaries who, of course, take a cut of the action. JPEG2000 is really the only format that makes that practical…and the movie industry has already mandated JPEG2000. If you think this concept is too far reaching then I point you to the music industry. When is the last time you bought a CD at Tower Records? Oh that’s right, they closed all their retail stores.
UWB - this seems like a strange choice, but the UWB vendors might stand to be the first folks to get JPEG2000 decoders built directly into televisions. If that gets traction…watch out…can you say disruptive techology.
