IBC Report Part II & Round-up
This is the second part of our IBC 2024 report. We highlighted developments in cameras and capture previously.
IBC is a big event for the set top box and semiconductor markets. Europe, the Middle East and Africa are full of smaller network operators that are looking for solutions for their customers. That is quite different, for example, from the US, where there are fewer but larger operators.
SOCs and STBs
Amlogic was showing its S928X STB SoC which, the firm told us, uses a 6nm manufacturing process and supports 8K. It uses Cortex A-76 and A-55 cores with a Mali G57 GPU. Memory is compatible with LPDDR4. The chip is in mass production and has already been adopted by Kaon in its 8K boxes. 8K STBs are being promoted by Korea Telecom, we heard at the show.
Marusys ia another STB (IP/Cable/Satellite) maker that is based in Korea and has been operating for 26 years. Among the companies it supplies is Korea Telecom and it uses chips from Broadcom, Amlogic and Realtek. Marusys will have a new 8K STB at the end of 2024 that will be based on Android. It will also act as a Wi-Fi 6 access point. The company told us that it is one of nine Netflix Self-serve partners. That’s particularly useful for small operators that can implement Netflix service without the need to negotiate with the streamer.
NXVI of China has what it claims is a unique solution for 8K VR. The company was using a Nikon camera with the Canon stereo 3D lens and the HDMI output was then being captured and encoded in 8K with HEVC. NXVU told us that the Canon solution is limited to 4K, but the NXVI said that it can provide 10 bit 4:2:2 quality for the highest levels of professional quality. It can also capture from SDI and the product is shipping now. NXVI has been collaborating with other companies in China on 4K and 8K capture, encoding and switching.
Displays & Distribution
Asus was showing the 8K ProArt calibrated monitor that it announced at NAB earlier this year. The product should be in mass production in Asia this month and should be in the European market during Q4 of this year. Staff told us that the monitor uses 4K LED dimming zones. The company also had a range of 4K models including the 32UCE which includes calibration but an ‘affordable’ price of €1,199. The firm also highlighted its ‘LuxPixel’ low reflection display coatings.
8K Association member, BZBGear was demonstrating its full range of 8K connectivity products with a large booth. The next product that is being developed is an 8K AV over IP solution. This may be a popular option for firms that want to be able to support 4 4K displays in a video wall configuration for digital signage. The product should be ready to go in Q1 next year.
The Fraunhofer HHI had two demonstrations that caught our attention. First was a demonstration of the institute’s technology for film grain analysis and re-creation. Some film-sourced content was created with noticeable film grain and sometimes the aim is to ensure this effect is delivered to the viewer. Unfortunately, capturing the film grain accurately can really cause challenges in terms of the bitrate needed in the content. The demo at IBC showed how a video that was just 2.5Mbps without grain needed 60Mbps if the grain is fully captured. The HHI was showing how it could analyze the grain structure, create metadata to characterize it and then use that metadata to recreate the grain at the display device. This kind of feature is mandatory for the AV1 codec, but HHI was showing the process using the optional metadata feature of VVC. After the process, content with grain could be compressed to 2.5Mbps.
The second demo was of an avatar-based conferencing system. The technology created a 3D model of the speaker at one end of a conversation and then transmitted the avatar that was created from the model. 8K video was then mapped onto the model to create what HHI thinks is a realistic image. In the demo, a multi-view display was used so that two users had slightly different views of the avatar from different angles, but each with direct eye contact.
InSync Technology believes it is a market leader in its segment, but described itself as the company whose products you have seen but have not been aware of. (Matrox used to describe itself that way as so many of the firm’s products were used in digital signage). InSync has high end motion compensated format conversion technology. Historically, the firm’s algorithms were implemented in dedicated hardware, but increasingly it is implemented as software running on CPUs based on X86 or Arm technology. That means it can be used in the cloud as it is OS agnostic.
InSync believes that it has the best power/density performance an increasingly important metric and it said that it can run FullHD at 35W/channel while it can process 8K at 200W/Channel. InSync told us that its competitors sometimes use up to 800W/channel. The company has Intel/Xilinx FGPAs for optimising performance. All of the software is developed in-house which makes security and other clearances simpler. We asked whether there are particular metrics for this format conversion, but the firm said that it relies on human perception. The company is using machine learning techniques and believes that it can avoid AI ‘hallucinations’ because of this.
Konvision is.a well established maker of broadcast monitor displays. It advertised its new QD-OLED-based monitor as 8K compatible, but this is because it can accept 8K input signals via SDI, although, of course, the displays are just 4K. Samsung Display does not make native 8K QD-OLED panels at the time of publication.
Spin Digital is an 8K Association member and had a demonstration of live VVC (H.266) encoding in 8K. The firm had shown its pre-encoded 8K being played back at NAB 2024, but the firm developed a live encoder that was used by Intel for its live 8K streaming at the Paris Olympics. As well as the live encoding, the firm showed how ST.2110 could be used for input at 8K/60 although 8K/120 is possible. Spin Digital also was showing how it could encode stereo 3D content for the Apple Vision Pro with 8K60 in each eye and using the MVHEVC codec.
VVC is still at the forefront of decoding although vendors told us at the show that HEVC live encoding is ‘now a commodity’.
Other 8K Technology
DFT is a specialist in film scanning, It was the partner of the German National Archive in developing a scanned 8K version of the film Mahabharata which we reported on recently. The partners have developed a special film scanner that was optimised for old film which is often very fragile and may have damaged perforations etc.. The film is held under steady tension as it comes off one reel or goes onto the other. However, the frame is scanned a frame at a time, whereas most bulk film scanners work on a line by line basis. The frame is flashed with red, green and blue to capture full color. The frame is held still and the tension is maintained by oscillating rollers each side of the scanned area.
When talking to Pawel Achtel from Achtel.com about his high resolution camera, we were bemoaning the lack of metrics for evaluating the true resolution of content. Regular readers will remember Samsung Research highlighting that much of the content it gets as ‘8K’ is in an 8K container, but does not contain the right amount of high frequency data to be really called 8K resolution. “Ah!”, said Achtel, “You need to talk to Wavelet Beam“. We tracked the company down in the German pavillion and asked about its technology.
Wavelet Beam makes tools for video processing including quality assessment beyond the usual signal to noise and PSNR calculations. The company has technology for professional level de-noising and also for analysis and synthesis of film grain. Dealing with noise artifacts effectively can significantly improve the quality of other video processing later in the signal chain, such as upscaling.
