UHD Spain analyzes the streaming challenges at ultra high definition

In his fourth virtual meeting, restricted to members of the association, UHD Spain It has had the presence of more than 40 attendees who shared their knowledge about the main streaming challenges at ultra high definition.

The meeting, led by PEOHAN PEOPLE, VP Emerging Technologies de Perteme, raised the workflows for video on demand and linear channels, as well as the main challenges of this image resolution standard and the latest generation audio.

Xavier Redón, Product Manager of Cellnex, vice president of UHD Spain and coordinator of the broadcast work group made a brief introduction of welcome to the meeting and gave way directly to Sassan Pejhan that, inside a compact and complete one -hour agenda began its masterclass exposing what its definition on UHD was.

"From my own point of view, ultra high definition, also known as Ultra HD or UHD, is a standard that specifically refers to an image resolution with more pixels, higher quality of them, a better optimization of frames and, the great forgotten, a better sound quality, which includes an immersive, customized and interactive sound," he said.

During the Pejhan meeting he also presented a historical evolution of the Codec developed for UHD since the mid-80s of the last century, with the H.120, through the MPEG, Truemotion and VP, AV1, VVC and until reaching cod H.265/High-Efficiency Vide 4k.

"A video compression technology that offers up to 50% compression relations higher than the previous compression standards, although the problem of the fragmented patents has not yet been solved," said Pejhan.

Currently the codec par excellence is the HEVC, but this standard has a root problem that is making many companies bet on other alternatives, and it is none other than licenses. "The HEVC is divided between several license packages, which complicates the adoption by developers and companies. It is here where the MPEG-5 and the AV-1 enter with its open codes," he explained.

The surprising thing about the new MPEG-5 EVC, "is that it offers the same quality as the current Hevc codec, but using a much lower medium bitrate. This provides a much higher benefit when we talk about the bandwidth in transmissions would be reduced when the Internet connection is limited."

At the moment Av-1 It looks like a strong competitor, since he is receiving a lot of support from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, LG and Netflix. A very interesting feature of the AV-1 codec is the inclusion of the granular effect processing (film grain) to maintain artistic intention and reduce bandwidth more. Ateme has been working on this functionality for some time and has up to 5 patents in this field.

Pejhan also talked about the new codec VVC, which allows to reduce the size of the videos by half of what they occupy now in H.265/HEVC.

Main challenges

After the explanation of the ATEM manager on the different codecs current Masterclass with a conclusion about where to display a UHD streaming platform, in Cloud, On-Prem or both.