Post by dkennedy on Feb 25, 2005 7:10:04 GMT -5
MPEG-4 launch: DirecTV spends on HDTV compression
Matthew Miller, Executive Editor, Online -- EDN,
Tandberg Television announced yesterday that DirecTV has committed to spending $9 million on Tandberg's MPEG-4 AVC (advanced video coding) encoding equipment as part of the satellite-TV provider's aggressive push to expand its HDTV offerings.
Tandberg's encoding systems will compress and multiplex HD channels before they're transmitted to a fleet of four new satellites DirecTV plans to launch over the next three years. Spaceway 1 and 2, slated to lift off this year, will have the capacity for 500 local HD channels. DirecTV 10 and 11, scheduled for launch in 2007, will add another 1000 local HD channels and more than 150 national HD channels, according to the companies. In all, Tandberg's systems will eventually feed HD content to 26 transponders aboard the birds.
Tandberg claims it won the business because its EN5990 is the industry's first production-ready, real-time encoding system using MPEG-4 AVC (also known as H.264 and MPEG-4 Part 10). The system guarantees no frame dropping and offers preprocessing options for noise reduction and horizontal resizing, according to the company. In DirecTV's infrastructure, each EN5990 will be paired with a Tandberg multiplexing system.
The company delivered an evaluation system to DirecTV in Q4 of last year, and that system is now proving itself in DirecTV's labs and in operation over a satellite link, according to Tandberg.
Like many useful technologies, H.264 will find its way into a wide range of end-user products. For example, this week at the 3GSM Congress in Cannes, Hantro is demonstrating a software implementation of the codec running on a Sanyo application processor. A far cry from HDTV, Hantro's 6100 decoder and playback engine targets mobile-phone applications—it offers 15-fps playback at QVGA resolution with audio—and can run on existing ARM processors.
Matthew Miller, Executive Editor, Online -- EDN,
Tandberg Television announced yesterday that DirecTV has committed to spending $9 million on Tandberg's MPEG-4 AVC (advanced video coding) encoding equipment as part of the satellite-TV provider's aggressive push to expand its HDTV offerings.
Tandberg's encoding systems will compress and multiplex HD channels before they're transmitted to a fleet of four new satellites DirecTV plans to launch over the next three years. Spaceway 1 and 2, slated to lift off this year, will have the capacity for 500 local HD channels. DirecTV 10 and 11, scheduled for launch in 2007, will add another 1000 local HD channels and more than 150 national HD channels, according to the companies. In all, Tandberg's systems will eventually feed HD content to 26 transponders aboard the birds.
Tandberg claims it won the business because its EN5990 is the industry's first production-ready, real-time encoding system using MPEG-4 AVC (also known as H.264 and MPEG-4 Part 10). The system guarantees no frame dropping and offers preprocessing options for noise reduction and horizontal resizing, according to the company. In DirecTV's infrastructure, each EN5990 will be paired with a Tandberg multiplexing system.
The company delivered an evaluation system to DirecTV in Q4 of last year, and that system is now proving itself in DirecTV's labs and in operation over a satellite link, according to Tandberg.
Like many useful technologies, H.264 will find its way into a wide range of end-user products. For example, this week at the 3GSM Congress in Cannes, Hantro is demonstrating a software implementation of the codec running on a Sanyo application processor. A far cry from HDTV, Hantro's 6100 decoder and playback engine targets mobile-phone applications—it offers 15-fps playback at QVGA resolution with audio—and can run on existing ARM processors.