NAB2006: T-VIPS to Show JPEG2000 HD Backhaul IPTV

T-VIPS plans to unveil its HD IP (Internet Protocol) video backhaul scheme based upon JPEG2000 compression. The firm, headquartered in Olso, Norway, said its new unit (model TVG430) will reduce bit-rate requirements of an HD-SDI signal from 1.485 MB to 50-200 MB.

T-VIPS said it selected the JPEG2000 format for what it perceives as several advantages over traditional video formats -- especially maximizing video quality for HD post production, as well as the format's high resilience to packet loss. Proponents of JPEG2000 say it can operate at higher compression ratios without generating the characteristic "blocky and blurry" artifacts of the original DCT-based JPEG standard. It also allows more sophisticated progressive downloads.

Unlike DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) compression methods such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and VC1, which encode using I-frames and motion vectors to build the frames in between the I-frames, JPEG2000 is wavelet-based and encodes each frame independently. T-VIPS said this means errors introduced through packet loss are not carried over to subsequent frames, which can be a major advantage in terms of error resiliency.

In addition, the firm said, the wavelet compression method does not suffer from the visual blocking impairment of DCT-based standards and provides 10-bit resolution inherent in the HD-SDI format.