UHD data rates get astronomical for uncompressed formats. A 4K video stream Baseband requires 11 880 Mbps, which is eight times the bandwidth needed for an HD video stream Baseband (1485 Mbps).
The first and expensive way to take on this challenge is to get more bandwidth over the network infrastructure (from 10G, to 40G to 100G,…) or more SDI cables within the studios and broadcast facilities. But this is not cost effective, appropriate and scalable.10GbE ports, 3G-SDI are commonly available, deployed and affordable today and will continue to be massively deployed in the near future. To answer the strong desire to manage UHD 4K and UHD 8K content in a practical and cost effective way on this existing infrastructure, a high quality HD/UHDTV mezzanine compression is needed.
JPEG2000 is a perfect mezzanine compression. Following the VSF Technical recommendations, broadcasters are using JPEG2000 wrapped in MPEG2-TS over SMPTE2022 1/2 for contribution for its low latency, visually lossless quality and robustness. The codec implemented in FPGA offers huge interest as it supports multiple bit depth, frame rate and resolutions.
TICO is a new technology and is based on a market-driven research for lightweight compression. It aims to enable a mezzanine 4K/8K workflow from 2:1 to 4:1 compression with no effect on quality and latency: it is visually lossless with only few pixel lines of latency. TICO makes it possible to map 4K over a single 3G-SDI, or 10GbE link: it offers a smart infrastructure upgrade to 4K at an equivalent price and complexity than existing baseband HD operations. With its pixel-lines-based-latency, it is easy to combine TICO with SMPTE2022 5/6 or Ethernet-AVB.
Combination of a visually lossless and ultra-low latency mezzanine compression with future proof transmission protocols such as SMPTE2022 and Ethernet-AVB over 10G infrastructure are the keys to bring about a cost effective solution that address the 4K and 8K challenge.
The industry is moving on to what is sure to be one of the biggest technology trends over the next five plus years. intoPIX compression technologies combined with SMPTE2022 or Ethernet-AVB on FPGA are great examples of how we are pushing the boundaries and contributing towards the move to full IP infrastructure supporting HD but also 4K and 8K.
