Cable Technology Feature Article
September 12, 2008
Tandberg TV's MPEG-4 AVC to Assist Comstar-Direct
By Shireen Dee, TMCnet Contributor
Tandberg (News - Alert) Television recently announced that Comstar-Direct will expand its IPTV head-end to support MPEG-4 (Motion Pictures Experts Group format 4) AVC (Audio Visual Connection) encoding and transcoding. Tandberg Television is a part of the Ericsson (News - Alert) Group with a suite of open, standards-based products. It provides worldwide broadcasters with solutions for Digital TV, HDTV (High Definition Television), VOD (Video-on-Demand), and IPTV (News - Alert).
With this new development, Comstar-Direct can enjoy the benefits of the higher bandwidth efficiencies of MPEG-4 AVC encoding which are said to be suitable for video over DSL (Domain-Specific Language) networks. The single module iPlex transcoding will help operators ingest and convert the MPEG-2 feeds in to MPEG-4 AVC without the necessity of decoding and re-encoding. Thus, this process of transcoding in a single step is not only cost-effective but will also help in retaining the picture quality as well as assist in easy re-synchronization of video with subtitles.
“Tandberg Television has provided a very powerful head-end solution that supports higher quality pictures in low bit-rates, and the introduction of MPEG-4 AVC encoding extends the reach of IPTV across our broadband network,” remarked Viktor Belov, Comstar-Direct’s technical director. “We were early to market with IPTV in Russia and are determined to maintain our leading position through consumer service and technical innovation. The iPlex transcoding capabilities we have added mean we can enjoy the benefits of MPEG-4 AVC without a cost or quality penalty when converting program feeds from MPEG-2.”
While the new transcoding function is part of the Tandberg iPlex Ultra Compression IPTV video processing and transcoding system, Tandberg Television’s EN8030 is a sophisticated MPEG-4 AVC encoder that will deliver industry-leading picture quality to Comstar-Direct at low bit rates.
“This is another important operator deployment for Tandberg Television’s IPTV head-end and transcoding solutions,” stated Pawel Sulikowski, sales director, Tandberg Television.
“MPEG-4 AVC compression delivers high quality pictures in much lower bandwidth than MPEG-2. However, to maximize the benefits of the new codec, it is important that IPTV operators do not lose picture quality when converting MPEG-2 inputs. As most of the world’s video is still distributed in MPEG-2 today, transcoding is a very important function and we are proud to be pioneering its use,” Sulikowski added.
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Shireen Dee is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Shireen's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Michelle Robart
