EnCodER Tech
GuIde
INSIDE
THIS ISSue
Adtec, Blankom, Cisco, page 1
EGT, Harmonic,.............. page 6
Harris, Motorola ........... page 8
Radiant, Tandberg ........ page 9
Thomson, , Scopus ..... page 10
July 2008
MSOs Shift Encode Gears
By Jonathan Tombes
A potent combination of strong ator (MSO) however, the equa- to customers, each with its own
demand, technical complexity tion is knotty. technical constraints. And there
and market confusion character- There is the discontinu- is the structural variety of cable
izes the encoder business. ity between MPEG- 2’s age and systems, some linked via fiber
Service and content provid- ubiquity and MPEG- 4’s youthful backbones, some not.
ers of all stripes are hungry for
products that can encode as well
as decode and re-encode--or
transcode--digital video. As Leslie
Ellis put it in a recent column,
this category is en fuego.
Against that heat lie the com-plexities of encoding technology.
Ask an expert about MPEG life
cycles and you’re liable to get not
only the obligatory lecture defining the multiple parts of these
standards (see sidebar) but also
an analysis of “multi-stripe” vs.
“single-slice” implementations,
differing proprietary approaches to
group of pictures (GOP) structures
and the awesome power of the
MPEG- 4 toolset.
The technical story translates
into confusion, but so does the
business of key players, especially cable operators. Direct
broadcast satellite (DBS) service
providers suffer less because
of a neat correlation between HD quality matters to members of the AV Science Forum (www.avsforum.
network encoding and customer com) where one analysis of comparable screenshots from Verizon and
premise-based decoding technol- Comcast appeared in April. Which is which? (Reprinted with persmission.)
ogy. Telco providers of video have
started from a relatively clean and largely inaccessible supe- Then there is the profusion of
slate. Programmers are answer- riority. There are the various products that aim to solve piecing their own questions. ways--broadcast, switched and es of this multivariate equation.
For the multiple system oper- on-demand--of transmitting video continued on page 3
MPEG Primer
MPEG-1: Audio and video
compression standard used
for compact disc digital video;
includes the MP3 audio com-
pression format.
MPEG-2: Multi-part standard
for audio, video and transport
for broadcast-quality television.
Part 2 provided support for
interlaced video. Part 6 included
the digital storage media,
command and control (DSM-
CC) protocol. Part 7 defined
advanced audio coding (AAC).
MPEG-3: Dropped as an early
HDTV standard in favor of
MPEG- 2 extensions.
MPEG-4: A developing standard
with more than 20 parts that
defines methods (including
“profiles” and “levels”) of
compressing multimedia audio
and video. It adds a large set
of analysis and compression
tools. Commonly indicated in
common parlance is Part 10,
which is also referred to as the
advanced video coding (AVC).
MPEG- 4 AVC is identical to
ITU-T H.264.
MPEG-7: An XML-based meta-
data standard.
MPEG-21: Another XML-based
standard, focused on digital
rights and rules.
