MEMS mics are taking over. Almost every mobile device has ditched its old-fashioned electret microphone invented way back in 1962 at Bell Labs. Expect new piezoelectric MEMS microphones, which promise unheard of signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of up to 80 dB (versus 65 dB in the best current capacitive microphones) in 2015. MEMS microphones are growing like gangbusters.
Analysts and veterans of the International CES expect to see plenty of 4K ultra-high-definition televisions, new smartwatch uses, and a large section of the show floor dedicated to robotics. 2015 will be the first year CES gets behind 4K in a big way, as lower price points make the technology more attractive to consumers. Samsung, Sony, Sharp, and Toshiba will be big players in the 4K arena. OEMs must solve the problem of intelligence and connectivity before 4K will really take off. CES attendees may also see 4K TVs optimized for certain tasks, along with a variety of sizes. There will be 10-inch and 14-inch and 17-inch UHD displays.
4K is not enough anymore? 8K – finally come true? Korean giant LG has promised to introduce ehdan 8K TV at CES 2015 exhibition in January. 8K means a total of 33.2 million pixels, or 7680 x 4320 resolution. 4K video material fate is still uncertain, 8K video can not with certainty not available for a long time.
Sound bars will be a big issue at shows. One problem with new TVs — the thinner they are, the harder it is to get sound out.
Open file formats Matroska Video (MKV) and Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) gets more widely used as Windows 10 To Feature Native Support For MKV and FLAC.
Watching shows online is more common now. More people are watching videos on smaller screens. You can use a tablet as personal TV. Phablets and portable televisions have taken off in China, Japan, and Korea, where many people watch videos during long commutes. Tablets now have become so ubiquitous and inexpensive that you can buy them for a specific application. Much of the innovation will be in software, rather than hardware — tuning the tablets to boot up like a television instead of an Android tablet
We’re all spending more time with smartphones and tablets. So much so that the “second screen” may now be the “first screen,” depending on the data you read. It seems inevitable that smartphones and tablets will replace the television in terms of time spent. Many metrics firms, including Nielsen, report on the rapid increase of mobile device usage—especially when it comes to apps. Half of YouTube’s views now come from phones and tablets.
Qualcomm will push this year broadcast LTE. That will be picked up more and more by some vendors in tablets, so they can have broadcast TV signals, but it doesn’t have to be generic LTE.
There will be lots of talking on traditional TV vs new streaming services, especially on who gets which program material and at what price. While it’s possible to create a TV platform that doesn’t deal with live channels, smart TVs and game consoles alike generally try to integrate the content as best they can.
Netflix’s new strategy to take on cable involves becoming best friends with cable to get its app included on set-top boxes of cable, fiber and satellite TV operators. Roughly 90 million U.S. households subscribe to cable or other forms of pay TV, and more than 73 million subscribe to the biggest five operators alone. That’s why Netflix has been working hard to team up with one of these major operators.
Google intends to integrate content best it can. Google Publishes ‘Live Channels For Android TV’ App Into The Play Store. G The “Live Channels for Android TV” app is unsurprisingly incompatible with phones and tablets, maybe because for some reason those markets are intentionally artificially tried to be kept separate.
Virtual reality video is trying to get to spotlight. Samsung’s new Milk VR to round up 360-degree videos for Gear VR article tells that Milk VR will provide the videos for free as Samsung hopes to goose interest in virtual reality. Milk VR service will provide free 360-degree videos to anyone using a Gear VR virtual-reality headset (uses Galaxy Note 4). Samsung wants to jump-start the virtual-reality movement as the company is looking at virtual reality as a potential growth engine at a time when one of its key traditional revenue sources — smartphones — has slowed down. The videos will also serve as a model for future filmmakers or artists looking to take advantage of the virtual-reality medium, as well as build up an ecosystem and viewership for VR content.
Although digital video is increasing in popularity, analog video remains in use in many applications.
1,154 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Imgur introduces embed option for online publishers to repost and attribute photos on their own site — Image-hosting platform Imgur is making it easier for publishers and bloggers to use its content, with the launch of a new embed feature. — Similar to how you can embed videos hosted on YouTube …
Imgur introduces embed option for online publishers to repost and attribute photos on their own site
http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/07/imgur-introduces-embed-option-for-online-publishers-to-easily-re-post-photos-on-their-own-site/
Similar to how you can embed videos hosted on YouTube, content on Imgur will now have an additional “Embed” option in a little dropdown menu, which gives code for easy reappropriation on other sites.
Founded in 2009, Imgur sees 1.5 million images uploaded every day
Third parties
Thus far, anyone wishing to reuse Imgur content would have to save a photo to their desktop and reupload it to their own site, while remembering to include the proper credit. With this new embed link, however, not only does it remove the hassle of downloading/uploading a picture, but it also automatically includes attribution to ensure the original snapper is given due credit.
“There’s a massive ecosystem of publishers who regularly post content from Imgur to their own sites,” explained Chris Gallello, product manager at Imgur. “That said, it’s been an inconvenient process. With our new embed unit, they can easily do all of this by copying a single line of HTML and pasting it into their own site.”
“Embedding” content has become a popular means of helping companies gain mindshare and increase virality across the web, aside from the obvious example of YouTube. Facebook has let users embed posts for a while
Tomi Engdahl says:
PH1-Pro4/System LSI
http://www.eeweb.com/company-news/socionext/ph1-pro4system-lsi
Panasonic has developed the “PH1-Pro4” single-chip system LSI to support high-quality and multi-channel video distribution. PH1-Pro4 can compress/decompress 3-stream full-HD video data simultaneously. For VGA, 12 streams can be handled simultaneously.
Transcoding/encoding 3-stream full-HD video data simultaneously
Controls the number of video data streams to be processed simultaneously, based on their size, enabling 12-stream simultaneous processing for VGA.
High-end decoding for 4K2K (30fps) video data
Upconverts video data from full-HD to 4K2K.
PH1-Pro4/System LSI for High Quality and Multi-channel Distribution
http://www.socionext.com/en/products/imaging/ph1-pro4/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Omnivision Loses Ground in CMOS Image Sensor Ranking
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326279&
Sony has pulled out a lead over its nearest competitors in the CMOS image sensor market in 2014 winning more than a quarter of the global market, according to according to market research company Yole Developpement.
Yole expects the CMOS image sensor market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.6 percent from 2014 to 2020 and reach an annual market value of US$16.2 billion in 2020. This implies a market value of about $8.85 billion in 2014 and $9.8 billion in 2015. The market was worth
In second position was Samsung with 19 percent as it climbed above Omnivision, which fell to third ranked position.
In 2014 Sony, Samsung and Omnivision commanded 63 percent of the market
Canon, Aptina – now On Semi – and Toshiba each lost 2 percent market share over two years
Tomi Engdahl says:
Netflix’s new terms allows the termination of accounts using a VPN
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/31ot3b/netflixs_new_terms_allows_the_termination_of/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Smartphone-Enabled Replicators Are 3-5 Years Away, Caltech Professor Says
http://build.slashdot.org/story/15/04/07/2228257/smartphone-enabled-replicators-are-3-5-years-away-caltech-professor-says
In just a few years, we could see the mass proliferation of DIY, smartphone-enabled replicators. At least, Caltech electrical engineering professor Ali Hajimiri and his team of researchers thinks so. They’ve developed a very tiny, very powerful 3D imager that can easily fit in a mobile device
Smartphone-Enabled Replicators Are 3-5 Years Away, Caltech Professor Says
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/smartphone-enabled-replicators-may-be-three-to-five-years-away
Hajimiri claims the imager may soon allow consumers to snap a photo of just about anything, and then, with a good enough 3D printer, use it to create a real-life replica “accurate to within microns of the original object.”
It’s called the nanophotonic coherent imager (NCI), and it’s small—it spans just a single square millimeter, and therefore easy to integrate into a smartphone—and cheap, since it’s made out of silicon, like most sensors. It is also exceedingly accurate, Hajimiri says—it utilizes LIDAR, a remote detection and sensing technique that bathes the intended object in lasers.
The light that is reflected off of the object is then picked up by on-chip detectors, called grating couplers, that serve as ‘pixels,’ as the light detected from each coupler represents one pixel on the 3D image.”
Hamiri tells me he sees the technology moving to mass market in three to five years.
There’s a strict limit on what consumers could be able to print, of course, imposed by the quality of the fabricator available and the materials at hand. But 3D printer (and Star Trek) enthusiasts will no doubt be enthused by the prospect—hell, one of Makerbot’s popular product lines is called the Replicator.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facial recognition algorithm identifies severity of autism
http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/print/volume-51/issue-04/newsbreaks/facial-recognition-algorithm-identifies-severity-of-autism.html?cmpid=EnlLFWApril72015
University of Missouri (Columbia) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU; Singapore) scientists have established that algorithms applied to facial surface measurements can identify the severity of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) in autistic children. It has been established that structural differences in the 3D facial morphology of autistic and normal children reflect alterations in embryological brain development and can identify two discrete ASD subgroups that specify the severity of impaired communication and repetitive/restricted behavior patterns.
Tomi Engdahl says:
YouTube: Hank Green tells fellow creators to aim for ‘$1 per view’
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/08/hank-green-youtube-1000-cpm-vlogbrothers
Online video veteran sees crowdfunding as the answer to his peers’ complaints about YouTube’s low advertising rates
Good news: online video star Hank Green has made around $2m of advertising revenue from the billion views of his videos over the last eight years. Bad news: he spent more than $4m making them.
Green isn’t downcast, though: he wants fellow YouTube creators to look beyond the current advertising rates on Google’s service, which he suggests are around $2 per thousand views (CPM, in advertising lingo), and turn to their fans for financial support.
Green wants YouTubers to be aiming much higher, though: “If creators can climb their way to a $1,000 cumulative CPM, a person with an audience of just a couple of thousand people would be able to be a full-time creator.”
The $1,000 CPM
Advertising is a kinda shitty model. It’s very exciting that we’re moving beyond it.
https://medium.com/@hankgreen/the-1-000-cpm-f92717506a4b
Sometime in the last year, my YouTube videos received their billionth view. At the average YouTube ad rate of $2 per thousand views (a $2 CPM), that’s around $2 million in revenue from advertising over the last eight years. Not bad!
Though, during those eight years, we have spent more than $4 million on the creation of YouTube videos. So also, not good!
Let’s do some quick math:
A 22 minute TV program is accompanied by sixteen 30-second ads, at an average cost of $25 per thousand impressions. That leaves us with a per-minute CPM of around $19. A 5.5 minute YouTube video monetized the same way would make about $100 per thousand impressions. After a billion views, that’s $100,000,000.
To be fair, YouTube would have taken 45% of that money,
so really I’m only down $53,000,000.
The CPM metric is not designed for creators; it’s designed for advertisers. It’s how much advertisers pay, not how much creators make.
This Is Not Actually Impossible
Imagine that you would like to consume a piece of content, but in between you and that content is a paywall. They’re asking $15 for one person to view the content one time. While a YouTube video might net you $2 per thousand viewers, this fantasy world I’ve just described will net you $15,000 per thousand impressions…A $15,000 CPM!
With a $15,000 CPM, every two thousand views is a full-time, living-wage human per year!
Of course, this model would never work…except that it works every day at every movie theater in America.
For a two-hour movie, that’s about $125 per minute per thousand people
If advertising is perfectly economically efficient, then we should be able to say that a YouTube video is 32× less valuable to a viewer than a TV show and 250× less valuable than a movie.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Affordable 3D camera will be on your smartphone
California University of Technology researchers have developed NCI image sensor (nanophotonic Coherent imager), which is a silicon-based and affordable 3D image of the circuit. It produces highly accurate, according to scientists measured the 3D model of the target. In addition, the device can be integrated into your smartphone.
In practice, each sensor NCI-pixel has a separate interferometer that senses light intensity in addition to the frequency and phase of the signal. Model to the object to be directed lidar- of laser beams.
The real innovation associated with interferometers supercharging a very small space. Each lidar element size is only a few hundreds of microns. According to the researchers, 16 such detectors can be planted in 300 x 300 micron silicon chips.
The first version of the circuit modeled only 16 pixels. In the future, the aim is to take a few hundred thousand pixel 3D image of the circuit, followed by the commercial exploitation of the technology would begin to be sensible.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2656:edullinen-3d-kamera-tulee-alypuhelimeen&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Sources: YouTube’s ad-free subscription service coming in the next few months for around $10/month, will offer offline viewing, creators required to join
YouTube’s paid subscription offering takes shape — and it’s almost here
Ad-free videos with offline viewing coming for around $10 a month
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/8/8371131/youtube-paid-subscription-offline-video
YouTube’s forthcoming paid subscription offering is rapidly taking shape, and is expected to become available within the next few months, sources familiar with the matter tell The Verge. The company told creators of popular channels today that the offering, which does not yet have a name, is coming soon. It will offer ad-free videos as well as the ability to store videos offline on their mobile devices, for a price expected to be around $10 a month. It will also let creators put their videos behind a paywall so that only subscribers to the premium version can view them, sources said. (Bloomberg published a letter sent to creators today.)
Google Plots New YouTube Subscription Service as Soon as This Year
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-08/google-plots-new-youtube-subscription-service-as-soon-as-this-year
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Invisible Design Behind the Apple Watch’s Many Faces
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/apple-watch-design/
Yet what Dye seems most fascinated by is one of the Apple Watch’s faces, called Motion, which you can set to show a flower blooming. Each time you raise your wrist, you’ll see a different color, a different flower. This is not CGI. It’s photography.
“We shot all this stuff,” Dye says, “the butterflies and the jellyfish and the flowers for the motion face, it’s all in-camera. And so the flowers were shot blooming over time. I think the longest one took us 285 hours, and over 24,000 shots.”
“We thought that there was something beautiful about jellyfish, in this sort of space-y, alien, abstract sort of way,” he says. But they didn’t just visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium with an underwater camera. They built a tank in their studio, and shot a variety of species at 300 frames-per-second on incredibly high-end slow-motion Phantom cameras. Then they shrunk the resulting 4096 x 2304 images to fit the Watch’s screen
Tomi Engdahl says:
Camera Slider Utilizes Skateboard Trucks
http://hackaday.com/2015/04/09/camera-slider-utilizes-skateboard-trucks/
[Peter] wanted a camera slider and found some inspiration on the good ole ‘net. He then gathered some parts and came up with his own design.
DIY Camera Slider – V1
http://imagemakersjourneys.blogspot.fi/2013/06/diy-camera-slider-v1.html?view=classic
Tomi Engdahl says:
Popcorn Time Releases iOS App Tomorrow, No Jailbreak Needed
By Ernesto on April 7, 2015
http://torrentfreak.com/popcorn-time-releases-jailbreak-free-ios-app-150407/
One of the most-used Popcorn Time forks will release an iOS app for non-jailbroken devices tomorrow. The new release opens up a whole new audience of hundreds of millions of devices. In addition, the Popcorn Time team suggests that other developers will soon be able to use the custom installer to break Apple’s closed ecosystem too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
4K resolution came to security camera
Multi-only dreams of 4K-resolution images that display the TV in their living room, but Sony has taken the latest technology to security camera.
SNC-VM772R camera combines high-definition 4K image, the light-sensitive 1 “size backlit Exmor R -CMOS sensor, an optimized frequency band processing, and intelligent snapshot recording. The result is a high-end performance, which is particularly suitable for urban areas, transport, railways, transport and airport surveillance applications.
4K resolution is useful for monitoring applications. Sharp details of the trace of the security staff to expand control the view and still be detected, zoom in and explore even small details in the picture, such as human faces and car number plates, one camera.
Traditionally, the image sharpness increase is automatically meant sacrificing light sensitivity. SNC-VM772R camera, this is avoided by using a large 1 “sized 20-megapixel Exmor R cell to obtain a clear image up to 0.1 lux light.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2660:4k-tarkkuus-tuli-valvontakameraan&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Richard Lai / Engadget:
Intel demos its latest RealSense depth-sensing camera, small enough for a 6-inch smartphone
Intel’s made a tinier, longer-range depth camera for phones
http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/07/intel-realsense-smartphone/
Intel RealSense on a smartphone prototype
Intel’s been a huge backer of gesture control plus 3D scanning, and so far it’s managed to integrate its RealSense technology into select desktops, laptops, tablets and even drones. The missing piece of the puzzle? Smartphones. But that’s no longer the case with Intel’s latest RealSense camera, as showed off by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich at IDF in Shenzhen today. The new module is significantly smaller and slimmer than the previous version, has a lower thermal output, and claims to have a longer detection range as well. As such, Intel’s able to fit it into a 6-inch smartphone prototype, though Krzanich, an exec known for taking risks with live demos, didn’t turn on said device on stage.
There’s no word on availability nor detailed specs of the new RealSense camera just yet
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Periscope update improves stream discovery, adds “follower only” mode to limit comments to people you follow
Periscope Tries To Fix Discovery And Comment Noise
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/08/friendiscope/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
SoundCloud starts working with YouTube’s partner to scan music for copyright infringement
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/9/8376765/zefr-soundcloud-partner-copyright-detection
It’s about money, not takedown requests
SoundCloud has formed a new partnership to scan uploaded music for instances of copyright infringement, but the deal isn’t necessarily about filing more takedown requests. Instead, the partnership with Zefr — the same company YouTube works with — will likely allow music labels to start making money off of their songs even when others have illegally uploaded them. Labels could, of course, just use the partnership to make more takedown requests, but the more interesting alternative is using Zefr the same way it’s often used on YouTube: to let copyright owners claim content as their own and start running ads on it.
It’s not stated exactly how this will play out on SoundCloud, but the partnership suggests that we’ll see similar results. Like YouTube, SoundCloud already has its own system for identifying copyrighted content, so it’s likely that the Zefr partnership is focused more on monetization.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Windows 10 unifies apps, movies, and music into a single store
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/9/8378589/windows-10-apps-movies-music-single-store
Tomi Engdahl says:
Canon’s New 4K Camcorder Twists to Take Pictures
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/canons-new-4k-camcorder/
Most of Canon’s camera designs are pretty straightforward. But the company has also thrown some interesting and super-weird models into the mix over the years: The tubular 35mm film Autoboy Jet, the submarine-themed PowerShot D10, and the buttonless and belt-buckle-sized PowerShot N among them. But 99 times out of 100, Canon’s design sense skews conservative.
Not this time, and it’s nice to see that Canon can still bring the funk. The new Canon XC10 ($2,500) splits the difference between a camcorder and a camera, although Canon is billing it primarily as a camcorder. The company says the XC10 was built with roving journalists in mind. It captures 4K video and 12-megapixel stills with its mechanical shutter and 1-inch-type sensor—the same size sensor found in Sony’s RX100 cameras and AX100 4K camcorder.
At its highest resolution setting, it captures 3840×2160 video at 30 frames per second. It will also record 1080p clips at up to 60fps, and 720p clips at up to 120fps for those slow-motion sequences. For the Ultra HD video, the camera uses Canon’s proprietary XF-AVC codec, which is also used in its just-announced Cinema EOS C100 Mark II professional camera. Here’s the kicker: That codec supports a bitrate of up to an insane 305Mbps. That should mean absurd detail.
In order to handle all that data per second, the XC100 won’t work with your average SD card to capture 4K video. It uses a CompactFlash-sized CFast 2.0 card—a 64GB SanDisk card and reader is included with the camcorder—although you can use SDHC/SDXC cards for 1080p and 720p recording.
It’s a fixed-lens camcorder, making it sort of a step-down non-interchangeable companion to the CX100 series, and its optics range from 24mm wide angle to 240mm telephoto (10X) with a maximum aperture of F2.8 to F5.6 at the respective ends.
Tomi Engdahl says:
3-D Map Shows the Colors You See But Can’t Name
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/3-d-map-shows-colors-see-cant-name/
When the Internet lost its collective mind over that (apparently black and blue) dress several weeks ago, science came to the rescue to explain why people were seeing two distinct colors. Humans identify color in different ways sometimes, and it looks like there’s no reconciling the divide: The world will always be prone to persnickety fights over color perception.
But there’s a problem with the way people talk about color that goes beyond weirdly divisive hyper-exposed photographs. The way parents and preschool teachers taught each of us to identify color—the ROY G. BIV spectrum—doesn’t actually do a great job of describing the wavelengths, intensities, and saturations that the human eye perceives. That schematic fundamentally limits the way humans talk about color, and therefore the ways they use it. That’s why researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University are working to create a new software for identifying colors that fills in for the fundamental limits of subjective visual perception. It’s called the Color Gamut: a color map that can analyze an image or video to identify all of its colors in precise, three-dimensional space.
“Identifying color in an everyday sense is like having a finite number of crayons,” says Meganck. “The more crayons you have, the bigger your gamut is—the more colors you can identify.” The goal of this new software is to give people a gamut that includes colors they don’t even have names for yet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon will stream movies and TV shows in vivid HDR later this year
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/10/8383607/amazon-streaming-movies-tv-shows-hdr-2015
Already delivering 4K movies and TV shows to its customers with Prime Instant Video, Amazon is now setting its sights on what’s next: HDR video playback. The company has announced that it will begin streaming content in High Dynamic Range (HDR) at some point later this year, though it’s not yet naming which titles will be given the treatment. Amazon says TV shows, movies, and its own original programming will be available in HDR, which offers more vibrant imagery compared to traditional video output. It’s brighter, more colorful, and truly stunning — but you’ll need a TV that supports it.
We’ve seen some of those at CES over the past two years, but you still can’t walk into a Best Buy and leave with a set that includes HDR (or Dolby Vision) playback. That’s changing this year, with top-of-the-line 2015 TVs from Sony and Samsung set to include the feature, though each company brands it differently.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Parallel Processing Spawns Non-MPEG Codec
V-Nova’s Perseus encodes UHD quality at HD bitrates
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326323&
What if video experts were to design a brand new video codec fit for 2015?
We live in the moment of 4K Ultra High Definition (UHD) TV, with a growing number of consumers viewing video sent over unreliable and bandwidth-constrained mobile networks, while CPUs and GPUs inside their mobile devices come with multiple cores, massively parallel processing capabilities and a very large cache.
And yet, we all know that no current video codec can comfortably handle 4K distribution to UHD TV at home, let alone deliver HD video to mobile devices.
The new video compression algorithm, if it emerges in 2015, probably, won’t be based on MPEG, or even the brand-new H.265.
A London-based startup V-Nova believes that the new video codec everyone should consider is its brainchild, called Perseus. It is designed to do hierarchical and scalable video encoding by leveraging massive parallel processing, while sidestepping the complexity of block-based compression algorithms.
V-Nova promises to make 4K transmission commercially viable, while enabling HD on 3G or 4G mobile network by using less power.
Perseus can, in short, encode and transmit UHD quality at HD bitrates, HD at SD bitrates, and SD video at audio bitrates
V-Nova said it’s been developing and testing Perseus for more than five years
The first transmission testing of Perseus was carried out by Sky Italia back in 2012. Hitachi provided Sky Italia with the first Perseus-based UHD video gateways.
Broadcom’s spokesperson, reached by EE Times, said, “We support V-Nova with our reference design and software environment.” Perseus implementations are being “driven by V-Nova through a software implementation of their algorithm.”
Massively parallel processing
So, how good and original is Perseus? And how do we know this isn’t yet another video codec said to be “ground-breaking to change the world forever” but never quite pans out that way?
Perseus is neither a “trick” nor a tweak on the conventional MPEG standards, Meardi said.
Meardi noted that Perseus is the first video codec — designed from the ground up — to compress video by leveraging “massively parallel processing.”
Since Perseus is designed to leverage multi-core CPU or GPU in a handset for parallel processing, rather than sequential processing, it is much less power-hungry compared with legacy MPEG-2 and H.264 technologies or even the newer H.265 (HEVC), according to V-Nova.
By quoting data made available by a large, unnamed mobile carrier testing Perseus, Meardi said Perseus uses 15 to 30 percent less power than H.264. If a chip company like Broadcom decides to make a hardware accelerator for Perseus, power consumption on mobile turns out even lower
No more block-based coding
In the course of its “rethinking” of a video codec, the V-Nova team also decided to eschew the block-based compression algorithms used in legacy codecs. “The block-based codec would only add large complexity,” said Meardi. “As blocks create artifacts, we need to de-block them, and then we also need to deal with variable block sizes.”
Other secret ingredients incorporated in Perseus include its hierarchical nature and its ability for creating a single file that can be delivered to devices in multiple scales.
Hierarchical structure is critical, because Perseus is designed to allocate data progressively, adding more details as necessary.
Rather than setting aside a special bandwidth for an HDTV stream in addition to an SD stream, operators will be able to send a single stream.
According to Cisco report, mobile video traffic exceeded 50 percent of total mobile data traffic for the first time in 2012 and grew to 55 percent by the end of 2014.
V-Nova’s PERSEUS® is an advanced signal processing technology based on the principles underlying human vision.
http://www.v-nova.com/en/products-and-technology.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Woeful groans over Game of Thrones’ spill on piracy sites
Turn us away, and we will burn you first
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/12/game_of_thrones_season_5_leaked_to_pirate_sites/
The first four episodes of the latest series of Game of Thrones has been leaked online – with fans reportedly downloading 550,000 illegal copies of the saucy, bloody fantasy drama in just 12 hours.
Season 5 of GoT is set to air in the US tonight on HBO, while Blighty fans won’t be able to view it over on Sky Atlantic until tomorrow evening.
But it would seem that plenty of folk are unwilling to wait for the eps of the epic drama to be drip-fed weekly on the tellybox.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Flir FX is a security camera with bigger ambitions
Can a home security camera also make for a good GoPro replacement?
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/7/8355123/flir-fx-security-camera-hands-on
it’s hard, and often downright impossible, to be that good at several things at once. And the same is often true with gadgets. But a new camera called the Flir FX is trying to do just that. It’s a home monitoring camera that can also be a GoPro-like action camera, dash cam for your car, or an outdoor security system — all depending on what kind of case you’ve inserted it into. The premise of the Flir FX seems to be that the guts of all these devices are basically the same, so why buy a completely different gadget for different types of activities?
That’s a pretty great take on how our electronics should serve us, though it comes with several major caveats — mostly that you end up having to spend more money on accessories to live that dream.
You might have heard the Flir name before from a $249.99 phone case the company has been shopping around that lets you see live thermal images with a special app.
What you get with the FX, which starts at $199 and goes up for preorders today, is a modular camera with 1080p resolution and a 160-degree viewing angle. Like other casual home monitoring cameras, it’s equipped with 802.11 b/g/n home Wi-Fi to stream video up into the cloud, a speaker and microphone for two-way conversations, and infrared LEDs that help it see about 30 feet in the dark. There’s also a microSD card slot and an included 8GB memory card to store video when you’re using it to capture footage on the go. Where things get interesting is that there’s a built-in two-hour battery in both the camera and its detachable stand. Combined, that means you get about four hours of battery life and video recording if your power goes out. When it comes back on, the system automatically uploads that footage to the cloud, so you don’t have a gap in your recordings. You can also connect directly to the FX to download footage or change settings when it’s running off batteries alone.
Flir has built in a fairly simple way to trigger what gets recorded and what doesn’t, using a mix of sound, temperature, and motion alerts.
Flir’s unique features over Dropcam and others are optional weatherproofing and a video replay tool called RapidRecap. The weatherproofing can be had with a special outdoor case that either runs as a $79.99 accessory, or as part of a $249 camera bundle. This can be mounted outside and adds special infrared LEDs that let the camera see 65 feet (up from the 33 feet you get with the built-in lights).
RapidRecaps are all the activity that’s been captured over the course of several hours — or even an entire day — overlaid at once, with timestamps. This means you don’t actually need to watch the entire recording to see comings and goings. Instead, it’s presented in a bizarre, ghost-like experience where people, cars, and pets move around and through each other with little floating timestamps. You can use this information to jump to that particular video snippet, and see it separate of everything else.
And how RapidRecaps actually help you surveil your home in realtime is questionable. Tools in competing products like facial recognition in ArcSoft’s Simplicam or Dropcam’s people detection seem like better solutions, alerting you to things as soon as they’re happening.
If there is one reason to go with Flir over the likes of Dropcam and Simplicam though, it’s the free cloud recording with alerts. Flir is doling out a generous two days of free cloud recordings as part of its Flir Cloud service. You don’t have to use this to operate the FX, but it’s nice to have.
All this is fine when comparing the FX to the Dropcam, but the FX promises to fill the role of two other gadgets: an action camera and a camera for your dashboard.
Who buys a home security camera to bring on vacations?
But most importantly: using the Flir FX outside your house means it’s no longer useful as a security camera, which is where most of its best features lie.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter Is Pushing Celebrities And Publishers To Stop Using Meerkat
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/12/this-stream-aint-big-enough-for-the-both-of-us/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1730_7314131817560702381
Twitter is doing whatever it can to help its live video streaming acquisition Periscope beat independent competitor Meerkat. Multiple sources tell TechCrunch that Twitter has been contacting celebrities who use Meerkat, trying to convince them Meerkat is dying and that they should use Periscope instead.
Sources also say Twitter has been in touch with media companies that use Meerkat, going so far as to imply that if they don’t exclusively use Periscope, it could cut off their access to Amplify. Amplify, in short, is Twitter’s answer to commercial TV: it’s a product that pairs media companies with brands to create promoted tweets based around video clips, giving a boost of reach both to the media company and the brand sponsoring it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Popcorn Time’s launched on iOS and that’s a big problem for Apple and Netflix
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/04/08/popcorn-time-for-ios-works-brilliantly-and-thats-a-big-problem-for-apple-and-netflix/
Torrent-streaming platform Popcorn Time has been causing headaches for the movie and TV industries ever since it emerged early last year.
While the project’s original developers stopped working on it after legal pressure, it was swiftly forked by a number of new teams that have kept it up and running.
While Popcorn Time has been available on Android for some time, it’s now arrived on iOS with an installer that can put the app on non-jailbroken devices. It’s likely that it uses a test key from an enterprise device to achieve that.
The new development could cause serious headaches for both Apple and legal streaming services like Netflix. In fact, Netflix itself singled out Popcorn Time as a serious competitor in a shareholder letter earlier this year.
The app is rough around the edges, the interface is nothing fancy
, but users will most likely put up with those minor inconveniences to get their hands on a large library of pirated content.
Like the desktop version, the new iOS incarnation of Popcorn Time has native AirPlay and Chromecast support.
This is one of those stories you can expect to run and run. So far, no one has been able to knock out Popcorn Time and I suspect not even Apple will be able to shut it down, although it will no doubt move swiftly to try.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Keach Hagey / Wall Street Journal:
Behind Time Warner’s struggle to launch HBO Now without alienating pay-TV providers
Behind Time Warner Chief’s ‘Cord-Cutter’ Pitch
CEO Jeff Bewkes wants to sell HBO online but must win over pay-TV providers
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/behind-time-warner-ceo-jeff-bewkess-cord-cutter-pitch-1428870356-lMyQjAxMTE1NDEzMjkxMTI2Wj
Just before 2 a.m. at his waterfront home in Greenwich, Conn., Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes early this month placed his fourth call of the evening to Dish Network Corp. Chairman Charlie Ergen.
They were racing to complete negotiations over how much Dish pays to carry Time Warner channels, such as TNT and CNN, on its satellite service.
If the two couldn’t seal a deal, Dish’s roughly 14 million subscribers would have to live without programming, such as the NCAA Final Four and the season premiere of “Game of Thrones.”
Dish, like many pay-TV operators, wasn’t initially comfortable with the idea—fearing HBO’s online service would lure away traditional TV subscribers. Dish’s concerns had contributed to a delay in negotiations
In the final push, the companies agreed to go after cord-cutters together: Dish would offer HBO via Sling TV, its own new online-TV service targeting cord-cutters, while the companies hashed out details that would give Dish incentive to sell HBO more actively.
The complexity of the negotiation shows the enormous challenge Mr. Bewkes faces as he tries to fashion a business model for Time Warner as the Internet remakes the television landscape.
Before, consumers who wanted to watch Time Warner’s networks had to buy a package of channels from a pay-TV distributor like Dish. But with the pay-TV industry in the early stages of decline, Mr. Bewkes concluded that targeting cord-cutters is imperative for growth.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Luis D. / PhoneArena:
Sharp announces 5.5″ 4K (2160 x 3840) IGZO display with 806 ppi, in mass production from 2016
Sharp not even joking, announces 5.5-inch 4K IGZO display with mind-blowing 806ppi pixel density
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Sharp-not-even-joking-announces-5.5-inch-4K-IGZO-display-with-mind-blowing-806ppi-pixel-density_id68189
Like it or not, 4K smartphone displays are heading towards us, and there’s nobody left to stop them! After Samsung casually hinted at 4K AMOLED displays for the upcoming Galaxy Note 5, Japanese purveyor of IGZO screens and border-less smartphones Sharp climbed on the stage to announce the world’s first 5.5-inch mobile display with a 2160 x 3840 pixels Ultra-HD (4K) resolution. The panel is scheduled for mass production in 2016, and comes with a mind-boggling pixel density of 806 pixels per inch.
Looking a little ahead, the announcement is made even crazier by the perspective of a non-too distant future, where smartphone displays have reached 8K (4320 x 7680) resolution – that’s 16 times as many pixels as ye olde 1080p display, as well as the resolution employed for top-end full dome theater projections! If you think we’ve finally lost it, well, LG is allegedly making an 8K 27-inch display for Apple, so shrinking it down to phablet-size is a matter of time and technological progress.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Delivering a single unified Store experience in Windows 10
http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/04/09/delivering-a-single-unified-store-experience-in-windows-10/
(As we announced back in September, we will be delivering one application platform for our developers to build apps for with Windows 10. These universal Windows apps will work across the entire device family spanning the PC, tablet, phone, Xbox, the Internet of Things, and more. To go along with this single unified application platform will be a single unified Store. This single Store experience will be the one way for apps and games to be discovered, purchased and updated across all of your devices. We’re also adding music, movies and TV shows into the Store for you purchase and access across all your devices too!
In the latest builds of the Windows 10 Technical Preview, you can see our unified Store experience coming together.
Starting today (rolling out over the course of the next 24 hours), we’re turning on the Movies & TV page in the Store Beta. If you are a Windows Insider running the latest build of the Windows 10 Technical Preview – you will now be able to browse and search for videos, rent or purchase movies & TV shows in the Store Beta and play them in the Video Preview app.
The experience you will see today is unfinished and we have a lot more work to do. For example – you won’t see movie or TV details like cast and crew and you’ll only be able to stream video content right now. But don’t worry – offline download capability will be coming!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nearly Half of Game of Thrones Season 5 Leaks Online
http://slashdot.org/story/15/04/13/1148203/nearly-half-of-game-of-thrones-season-5-leaks-online
Paul Tassi reports at Forbes that the first four episodes of the new season of “Game of Thrones”, nearly half of the ten total episodes, have been leaked online to various torrent sites. The four episodes appeared to come from a screener sent to reviewers with the digital watermark blurred out and are in 480p video format, equivalent to standard-definition TV, not HD.
Nearly Half Of ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 5 Has Leaked Online
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/04/12/nearly-half-of-game-of-thrones-season-five-has-leaked-online/
Bad news today for HBO, which is attempting to marry the recent debut of their HBO Now streaming service with season 5 of Game of Thrones. As of last night, the first four episodes of the new season, nearly half of the ten total episodes, have been leaked online to various torrent sites.
After appearing online yesterday afternoon, the episodes have already been downloaded almost 800,000 times, and that figure will likely blow past a million downloads by the season 5 premiere tonight.
Game of Thrones has consistently set records for piracy, which has almost been a point of pride for HBO.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Putting out Fires with a Dubstep Drop
http://hackaday.com/2015/04/13/putting-out-fires-with-a-dubstep-drop/
Two engineering students from George Mason University have built a rather unorthodox fire extinguisher. It uses a subwoofer to send sound waves powerful enough to extinguish small fires.
When it comes to putting out fire, GMU students show it’s all about that bass
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/when-it-comes-to-putting-out-fire-gmu-students-show-its-all-about-that-bass/2015/03/22/47a7f8e8-cf1a-11e4-a2a7-9517a3a70506_story.html
It happens so quickly you almost don’t believe it: Seth Robertson and Viet Tran ignite a fire, snap on their low-rumbling bass frequency generator and extinguish the flames in seconds. And even after you’ve seen it over and over, it’s still unbelievable.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Amazon launches X-Ray on Fire TV to bring IMDb movie and TV data to the big screen
http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/13/amazons-x-ray-arrives-for-fire-tv-and-fire-tv-stick-bringing-context-to-instant-video-on-the-big-screen/
Tomi Engdahl says:
David Katzmaier / CNET:
Vizio prices M series 4K TVs from $600, teases high-end, HDR-capable Reference series TVs
http://www.cnet.com/news/vizio-prices-m-series-4k-tvs-from-600-teases-high-end-reference-series-tvs/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sharp Announces 4K Smartphone Display
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/04/14/0237214/sharp-announces-4k-smartphone-display
Japanese electronics giant Sharp has announced production of 5.5″ displays with 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution. They’ll hit the market next year. The display will have a pixel density of 806 PPI. It’s not known yet which smartphone makers will build devices with these screens.
Sharp’s 4K Smartphone Display Highlights OEM Tradeoffs
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sharp-4k-display-smartphone-trade-offs,28915.html
Sharp announced today that it’s going to manufacture the world’s sharpest display, a 5.5″ IGZO screen with a 4K/UHD 3840 x 2160 resolution. The display has a pixel density of 806 PPI and will arrive in devices in 2016. [Samsung is another company that promised to smartphones with 4K displays.]
Not long ago, even the prospect of having a Full HD resolution on an ~5″ display seemed quite unbelievable. Now, some are disappointed that new flagship smartphones such as the HTC One M9 come with “only” a 1080p screen (something that HTC fixed in the HTC One M9+, although it won’t be available for sale in the Western markets).
Although devices that are 1440p or even 4K will look even more stunning, there are indeed diminishing returns benefits-wise as the cost, the power consumption, or the GPU resources required to handle such high resolutions are significantly higher than the previous generations.
For instance, the extra cost to get a 4K display over a 1440p display this year could be used instead towards improving the device’s camera.
Sometimes the competition among OEMs to “one-up” each other causes some monotony in the market. Consumers like to have “better” components every year, but that becomes quite predictable after a while, and consumers can become less interested in upgrading their phones.
Higher-resolution displays will also help lower the cost of lower resolution panels.There’s another angle to the trend of higher-res displays to consider, though: If 4K displays become popular in high-end flagship devices, then 1440p and 1080p panels will be an even more common occurrence at the mid-range, while HD 720p displays should soon become the norm at the low-end — even for devices that are less than $100 unsubsidized. And that’s not a bad thing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Four boggling websites we found hidden in the BitTorrent network using the Maelstrom browser
Chromium clone enters beta, plus tools to set up sites
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/14/maelstrom_browser_beta/
BitTorrent has released its Maelstrom combo-browser to all as a beta release.
Maelstrom merges the open-source Chromium web browser with a BitTorrent client, so you can fetch and render regular webpages on the internet, and download stuff from the BitTorrent file-sharing network, all from the same application.
Clicking on a torrent link to, say, a flick distributed over the peer-to-peer network starts playing the video in your browser tab.
More interestingly, though, is the ability to view static websites hosted in the BitTorrent network: there are tools available to create and seed simple pages into the network, which people can find using a torrent link. There’s no central server for the pages – they’re pulled from those seeding the site for you.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Old Fluorescent Fixtures Turned Into Fill Lights
http://hackaday.com/2015/04/14/old-fluorescent-fixtures-turned-into-fill-lights/
The Tymkrs are hard at work setting up their home studio, and since they’ll be shooting a few videos, they need some lights. The lights themselves aren’t very special; for YouTube videos, anything bright enough will work. The real challenge is making a mount and putting them in the right place, With a shop full of tools, making some video lights isn’t that hard and easily translates into a neat video project.
The lights began their lives as large fluorescent fixtures,
Tomi Engdahl says:
Spotify Nears Deal to Raise $400 Million at $8.4 Billion Valuation
Goldman Sachs and Abu Dhabi’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Have Committed
http://www.wsj.com/articles/spotify-nears-deal-to-raise-400-million-at-8-4-billion-valuation-1428700668
Spotify needs money, because its business model is pricey. About 70 per cent of sales are paid royalties.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Microsoft Updates Azure Media Services With Live Encoding, New Media Player And More
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/13/microsoft-updates-azure-media-services-with-live-encoding-new-media-player-and-more/
Microsoft is launching a number of new features for its Azure Media Services audio and video streaming platform today.
The highlight of this update is support for live encoding, which is now in preview. This builds on Microsoft’s existing live video capabilities for the service, but as a Microsoft spokesperson explained to me, this new feature now allows Azure’s media customers to “deliver a true Cloud DVR experience.” Live encoding gives Azure users the ability to build their own live workflows with live transcoding for multiple formats, archiving, just-in-time packaging (so you only render streams for the kinds of devices that actually request them), and dynamic encryption.
While Live Encoding is now in private beta, Microsoft also today launched the Azure Media Player, which now gives content owners an automated online player solution (instead of having to build their own) that supports all the usual industry standards like HTML5 video, Media Source Extensions and rights management through Encrypted Media Extensions. The focus here is on open standards, but on older browsers, the player can fall back on Flash or Silverlight.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stuart Dredge / Guardian:
Mobile is now the first screen, and TV industry has to work on mobile-first, not digital-first strategy, French TV exec says
TV industry faces its ‘ketchup’ moment: ‘Mobile is now the first screen’
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/13/tv-industry-ketchup-moment-mobile-first-screen
France Télévisions’ director of future media Eric Scherer on the trends providing headaches and huge opportunities alike for television firms
“The TV industry will have to work on a mobile-first strategy. Not a digital-first strategy, but a mobile-first strategy, because mobile is now the first screen, and it’s taking time away from the TV.”
Eric Scherer is director of future media at French broadcaster France Télévisions, so understanding – surprise! – the future of media is a key part of his job. In a speech at the MIPFormats conference in Cannes this weekend, he outlined the digital trends that he thinks are presenting traditional TV firms with headaches, but also huge opportunities.
“We are in a growing business. We are not in the print business, we are in the video business, and it is a growing business,” said Scherer, before warning his audience of television industry executives that they must adapt fast to changing technology and habits of viewers.
“the new kids on the block” in the form of apps including Instagram, Snapchat and Periscope.
“They are always mobile, they are always social, they are always interactive … and it is more and more live,” he said, before turning his attention to YouTube and the growth of multi-channel networks (MCNs) like Maker Studios, which was bought by Disney in 2014.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Former YouTube exec: don’t alienate fans by leaving the streaming service
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/16/youtube-patrick-walker-facebook-vessel-rightster
Patrick Walker, boss of multi-platform network Rightster, sees potential on Facebook, Vessel, Snapchat and other platforms – if creators are careful
Tomi Engdahl says:
YouTube’s top 10 games channels watched 2.2bn times in January
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/23/youtube-games-channels-january-views
And the top 100 gaming channels generated more than 6bn views that month, led by PewDiePie, Popular MMOs and Stampy
Tomi Engdahl says:
Peter Kafka / Re/code:
Apple takes only 15% of new-subscriber revenue from some Apple TV partners, including Neflix, Hulu Plus, and MLB.TV, in contrast to its 30% iOS standard
How to Beat Apple’s 30 Percent Subscription Fee: Sell Your Stuff on Apple TV
http://recode.net/2015/04/13/how-to-beat-apples-30-percent-subscription-fee-sell-your-stuff-on-apple-tv/
Did you sign up for HBO Now so you could watch “Game of Thrones” last night?
If you did, where did you sign up — on your iPhone, your iPad or your Apple TV? The answer could be worth millions to HBO and Apple.
Apple and HBO haven’t disclosed the terms of their partnership, which gives Apple a three-month digital exclusive for the streaming service.* But Apple’s existing deals with some video services give us a sense of what the company might be doing with HBO — and what the new economics of “over-the-top video” could look like.
When any publisher, including a video service, signs up a subscriber via an Apple app on an iPhone or iPad, Apple takes a 30 percent cut of the monthly fee. Apple introduced that policy in 2011, and while it was initially controversial, most publishers have learned to live with it. The only way to end-run that set-up is to not sign up customers via Apple apps at all.
But Apple didn’t extend its 30 percent policy to developers on its Apple TV platform. While Apple and its partners have never talked about it publicly, my understanding is that a handful of video services, including Netflix, Hulu Plus and pro-baseball’s MLB.TV, give Apple 15 percent of their monthly fees for any subscriber who signs up on Apple TV.**
Tomi Engdahl says:
OS X 10.10.3 brings enhanced 4K support (including 12-inch MacBook), adds 5K Dell for Mac Pro/iMac
http://9to5mac.com/2015/04/12/os-x-10-10-3-brings-enhanced-4k-support-including-12-inch-macbook-adds-5k-dell-for-mac-proimac/
Apple has expanded support for 4K displays in its recent OS X 10.10.3 release and officially confirmed specifics for using 4K displays with its new 12-inch MacBook.
While previously Apple only officially supported certain Multi-Stream Transport (MST) displays at a refresh rate of 60Hz, it now says that “most single-stream 4K (3840×2160) displays” are officially supported at 60Hz as well following the recent OS X Yosemite v10.10.3 update. That should mean support for a lot more inexpensive 4K displays that don’t include DisplayPort’s Multi-Stream Transport feature.
iMac (Retina 5k and 27-inch, Late 2014).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
Apple buys Israeli camera technology company LinX for about $20M — Apple Buys Israeli Camera-Technology Company LinX
Apple Buys Israeli Camera-Technology Company LinX
Companies had been discussing acquisition price of about $20 million
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/apple-buys-israeli-camera-technology-company-linx-1429037790-lMyQjAxMTI1NjE4NDAxMjQzWj
Apple Inc. has acquired Israeli camera-technology company LinX Computational Imaging Ltd.
Apple confirmed the acquisition with its standard statement when it has bought a company. “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” said an Apple spokesman.
LinX develops and markets miniature cameras for tablets and smartphones. Using an array of sensors that capture multiple images at the same time and proprietary algorithms, LinX says its cameras can gauge depth and create three-dimensional image maps.
Last year, the company said its tiny camera modules allow for better-quality pictures in low light and faster exposure at standard indoor conditions. It said the technology offers single-lens-reflex (SLR) camera image quality without the need for a bulky device.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Future-proofing HTPCs for the 4K Era: HDMI, HDCP and HEVC
by Ganesh T S on April 10, 2015 6:30 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9152/futureproofing-htpcs-for-the-4k-era-hdmi-hdcp-and-hevc
4K (Ultra High Definition / UHD) has matured far more rapidly compared to the transition from standard definition to HD (720p) / FHD (1080p). This can be attributed to the rise in popularity of displays with high pixel density as well as support for recording 4K media in smartphones and action cameras on the consumer side. However, movies and broadcast media continue to be the drivers for 4K televisions. Cinemal 4K is 4096×2304, while true 4K is 4096×2160. Ultra HD / UHD / QFHD all refer to a resolution of 3840×2160. Despite the differences, ’4K’ has become entrenched in the minds of the consumers as a reference to UHD. Hence, we will be using them interchangeably in the rest of this piece.
Currently, most TV manufacturers promote UHD TVs by offering an inbuilt 4K-capable Netflix app to supply ‘premium’ UHD content. The industry believes it is necessary to protect such content from unauthorized access in the playback process. In addition, pushing 4K content via the web makes it important to use a modern video codec to push down the bandwidth requirements. Given these aspects, what do consumers need to keep in mind while upgrading their HTPC equipment for the 4K era?
DisplayPort outputs on PCs and GPUs have been 4K-capable for more than a couple of generations now, but televisions have only used HDMI. In the case of the SD to HD / FHD transition, HDMI 1.3 (arguably, the first HDMI version to gain widespread acceptance) was able to carry 1080p60 signals with 24-bit sRGB or YCbCr. However, from the display link perspective, the transition to 4K has been quite confusing.
HDMI 2.0, which was released in late 2013, brought in support for 4Kp60 video. However, the standard allowed for transmitting the video with chroma downsampled (i.e, 4:2:0 instead of the 4:4:4 24 bpp RGB / YCbCr mandated in the earlier HDMI versions). The result was that even non-HDMI 2.0 cards were able to drive 4Kp60 video.
True 4Kp60 support comes with HDMI 2.0
HDMI 1.3 and later versions brought in support for 10-, 12- and even 16b pixel components (i.e, deep color, with 30-bit, 36-bit and 48-bit xvYCC, sRGB, or YCbCr, compared to 24-bit sRGB or YCbCr in previous HDMI versions). Higher bit-depths are useful for professional photo and video editing applications, but they never really mattered in the 1080p era for the average consumer.
HDMI 2.0a was ratified yesterday, and brings in support for high dynamic range (HDR). UHD Blu-ray is expected to have support for 4Kp60 videos, 10-bit encodes, HDR and BT.2020 color gamut.
HDCP 2.2
Content owners decided that 4K content would require an updated protection mechanism, and this prompted the creation of HDCP 2.2.
UHD Netflix-capable smart TVs don’t need to worry about HDCP 2.2 for playback of 4K Netflix titles. Consumers just need to remember that whenever ‘premium’ 4K content travels across a HDMI link, both the source and sink must support HDCP 2.2. Otherwise, the source will automatically downgrade the transmission to 1080p (assuming that an earlier HDCP version is available on the sink side).
HEVC – The Video Codec for the 4K Era
The move from SD to HD / FHD brought along worries about bandwidth required to store files / deliver content. H.264 evolved as the video codec of choice to replace MPEG-2. That said, even now, we see cable providers and some Blu-rays using MPEG-2 for HD content. In a similar manner, the transition from FHD to 4K has been facilitated by the next-generation video codec, H.265 (more commonly known as HEVC – High-Efficiency Video Coding). Just as MPEG-2 continues to be used for HD, we will see a lot of 4K content being created and delivered using H.264. However, for future-proofing purposes, the playback component in a HTPC setup definitely needs to be capable of supporting HEVC decode.
Despite having multiple profiles, almost all consumer content encoded in H.264 initially was compliant with the official Blu-ray specifications (L4.1). However, as H.264 (and the popular open-source x264 encoder implementation) matured and action cameras began to make 1080p60 content more common, existing hardware decoders had their deficiencies exposed.
Thankfully, HEVC decoding profiles have been formulated to avoid this type of situation.
Recently ratified profiles have range extensions [ PDF ] that target other markets such as video editing and professional camera capture. For consumer HTPC purposes, support for Main and Main10 4:2:0 will be more than enough.
Given the absence of a Blu-ray standard for HEVC right now, support for decoding has been tackled via a hybrid approach. Both Intel and NVIDIA have working hybrid HEVC decoders in the field right now.
Final Words
Unless one is interested in frequently updating components, it would be prudent to keep the two highlighted takeaways in mind while building a future-proof 4K home theater. Obviously, ‘future-proof’ is a dangerous term, particularly where technology is involved. There is already talk of 8K broadcast content. However, it is likely that 4K / HDMI 2.0 / HEVC will remain the key market drivers over the next 5 – 7 years.
Consumers hoping to find a set of components satisfying all the key criteria above right now will need to exercise patience. On the TV and AVR side, we still don’t have models supporting HDMI 2.0a as well as HDCP 2.2 specifications on all their HDMI ports. On the playback side, there is no low-power GPU sporting a HDMI 2.0a output while also having full hardware acceleration for decoding of the important HEVC profiles.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LVDS Laptop Display Interfacing
A journey into re-purposing old laptop screens
https://hackaday.io/project/4177-lvds-laptop-display-interfacing
This project is an experiment into the world of LVDS laptop screens. Long thought to be not possible or easy, I will show it is actually quite easy!
You might think that interfacing to a laptop LCD is not easily possible – laptop LCD panels do not provide an HDMI, DVI, or VGA interface, as they are intended to be wired directly into the laptop’s graphics controller. However most laptop panels use the same interface: LVDS (Formally known as FPD-Link or FlatLink), and the protocol itself is very basic requiring no configuration of the panel, only requiring that the graphics controller is configured for the correct resolution!
Instead of converting LVDS to a more usable protocol like HDMI/DVI, I am using a RIoT board which has a native LVDS connector, making it very easy to connect a panel!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Custom retina eyefinity array for PC
A 4608×2048 pixel ~20” PC display array made of three ipad 3/4 replacement
https://hackaday.io/project/4276-custom-retina-eyefinity-array-for-pc
A 4608×2048 pixel ~20” display made of three ipad 3/4 replacement screens off ebay. Inspired and partly documented in http://www.overclock.net/t/1389756/custom-screen-31-3600×1600-cost-250/0_50
Tomi Engdahl says:
DDN unveils filer boxes for all occasions at NAB 2015
Flies two new fancy filers for filer fetishists
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/15/ddn_flies_two_new_filers/
DDN has launched two new filers: the MEDIAScaler for media workflows and a refreshed GRIDScaler for HPC-style workloads.
Both were launched at NAB 2015, the National Association of Broadcasting Show in Las Vegas, where user attendees will typically work with large sets of often multi-component video files and need fast access to large amounts of content for processing. It’s a magnet for filer performance fetishists.
The MEDIAScaler is claimed to support more than 10,000 simultaneous users and sustain its performance with more than 90 per cent of the system’s resources utilised. It is configured as a cluster of nodes sharing a single file namespace. with load-aware software making sure the highest-performing available node is assigned to incoming work.
DDN claims Quantum (StorNext) and NetApp only support around 8 concurrent uncompressed 4K streams with Isilon supporting up to 1. Quantum and NetApp claim up to 1.6GB per sec bandwidth, compared to the MEDIAScaler’s 4GB per sec, with Isilon doing less than 1GB per sec.
DDN says the MEDIAScalar array can support various media workloads such as data ingest, editing, transcoding, distributing, collaborating and archiving, and is marketing it as an end-to-end media workflow platform. High-performance nodes do the ingest, editing and transcoding work. Cloud nodes look after collaboration, distribution and high-availability/disaster recovery. Cold data is sent to object and/or tape-based so-called active archives.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Netflix is the bellwether for cord cutting’s future – and today it looks unstoppable
http://bgr.com/2015/04/15/netflix-subscriber-gains-4-9-million/
A few minutes after reporting its quarterly report, Netflix share prices spiked by 12%, despite having already climbed by 40% so far this year. The key surprise here is the subscriber growth: The company added 4.9 million new subscribers during the quarter, which is about 20% more than Wall Street expected. When Netflix offers a subscriber growth surprise of this magnitude, investors will overlook earnings and revenue misses. And Netflix did miss on both of those counts.
Why is there so much volatility around Netflix’s share price and why is the bull-bear debate so acrimonious? Because this is a company in an unusually explosive spot.
We hear a lot about “cord cutters,” i.e., consumers who are willing to ditch their cable service and switch to relying on streaming video. But there is no industry consensus on how real this phenomenon is, either in the USA or in Europe.
Some claim that cord-cutting is heavily overhyped and a majority of U.S. consumers has no intention of abandoning their old, core content consumption patterns. Some believe that streaming video adoption will accelerate, causing a seismic upheaval in consumer behavior.
We are at the cusp of finding out the true scale of the online video streaming phenomenon and how it will affect the big mainstream of American consumers. Wealthy, technologically savvy Americans already embrace Netflix.
Netflix Gains More Users Than Projected
Investors cheer subscriber additions, but international expansion crimps profit
http://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix-adds-more-users-than-projected-1429128717?mod=yahoo_hs
Tomi Engdahl says:
World’s most powerful, 570-megapixel digital camera took image of space
Now the Dark Energy Survey has produced a map of dark matter the location. The map in the make had to use the Dark Energy Cameraa – 570 megapixel imaging device, one of the world’s most powerful digital cameras.
Map made by 130 million photos from heaven. Images, each pixel had to be analyzed and their location must be compared with the actual location of the dark matter in the sky.
The process was complex and time-consuming. The world’s biggest supercomputers harnessed to work.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/2015-04-14/Maailman-tehokkain-570-megapikselin-digikamera-kuvasi-avaruuden-3219732.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Netflix Says HBO Isn’t a Threat (Yeah, Right)
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/netflix-says-hbo-not-threat-yeah-right/
Netflix released its earnings for the first quarter of 2015 today, and the numbers look good. The streaming giant added a record 4.9 million subscribers globally, bringing more viewers than expected to the service thanks in part to its growing international audience.
Despite its apparent health, however, Netflix felt the need to make one thing clear: HBO is absolutely, totally, definitely not a threat—even with its new standalone streaming service HBO Now.
And yet the threat from HBO is greater than ever before. Prior to the launch of its HBO Now streaming service, HBO may have seemed too different to be a worry. Netflix’s streaming service has always catered to cord-cutters (or cord-nevers), while HBO’s service was still linked with cable, even through HBO Go. That all changed last week when HBO launched HBO Now for $14.99 a month, compared to Netflix’s monthly $7.99 fee for streaming.