In Broadcast - June 2018 - 57

57

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 8 - Issue 6 | June 2018

BBright: Full UHD HEVC Workflow
from Contribution to Delivery
Despite the inception of some very new video codecs, such as AV1 for the OTT arena and
AVS 2.0 for China, the HEVC/H.265 codec has now become ubiquitous worldwide...

H

EVC coding refinements indeed
bring around 50 per cent bitrate,
whether for broadcast, IPTV, cable TV
or OTT. Today, all 4K - UHD channels
use the HEVC technology for final
delivery to end-consumers (to STB or
TV, or on mobile).
At live production level, and within
broadcaster's head-ends, HEVC is
rather common too, although some
older video compression codecs
remain in use. Live sport contributions
would often be processed based
on very high bitrate JPEG-2000 or
multi-quadrant AVC/H.264 encoding.
However, from 2016 to 2017 there is
a clear market momentum to replace
four-quadrant Ultra HD contributions
with
single,
full-frame,
HEVC
contribution around 60 to 120 Mbps
for the same perceived visual quality.
Drastically reducing the transmitted
video bitrate offers lots of cost savings
associated to the contribution link.
Moreover, the advantage of providing

BBright specialises in
UHD/HEVC/HDR workflows

a single UHD contribution link encoded
in HEVC is the possibility to ingest
such live Transport Stream and then
directly re-use later the recorded
Transport Stream file for Non-Linear
Editing or for (time-shifted) playout
replay. This proves to be much easier
than transcoding ingested contribution
into H.264-based or other proprietary
pivot files. Indeed, H.264-based files
are much larger in size for the same
asset duration compared to HEVC files.
Bitrates up to 600Mbps impose larger
NAS for content storage and will stress
more intensively the broadcaster's IP

network for transfers, back-up, etc.
Finally, the HEVC Main 10 coding
profile, i.e. 10-bit encoding, has been
designed from the ground up to
natively support High Dynamic Range
(HDR). Different HDR schemes co-exist
on the market such as HDR10 - PQ
(with static metadata), HLG (being
backward compatible with SDR
display screens), DolbyTM Vision (using
dynamic metadata) and the newer
HDR10+ (also with dynamic metadata).
The French-based company BBright
is a reputed specialist of Ultra HD/
HEVC/HDR workflows. BBright delivers

InStudio

solutions for high bitrate HEVC live
Transport Stream contribution ingest
and also high bitrate HEVC decoding
back to baseband or to HDMI.
The companion BBright playout
servers can directly accept HEVC
Transport Stream files either for
baseband playout (quad 3G-SDI
output) with graphical insertions, or
for final delivery to end-consumers
(with multiple channels on TSoIP
output). The scheduling of playout
events is embedded and sequenced
internally and does not require costly
external automation control systems.
All BBright products are SDR,
HDR10-PQ and HLG compatible with
more support for other HDR schemes
to come. Such products are already
deployed in North America, Latin
America and Europe to support the
football World Cup.
BBright is ready to team up with
Asian broadcasters and service
providers to deploy full HEVC
workflows to improve video quality,
reduce bandwidth and storage
requirements and ultimately minimise
CAPEX and OPEX for new 4K/Ultra HD
Services.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.bbright.com/ http://www.appeartv.com http://www.appeartv.com
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