Technology

The first article of this series was about audio, this article is about video, the following articles will cover connectivity, not-too-distant-future, Internet and Broadcasting, and the Final thoughts.

Streaming and downloading SD, HD, UHD content with various compression algorithms (MPEG-4, HEVC, VP9, etc.) and various levels of image quality affected by the ISP connection is a concept that is generally accepted by consumers primarily due to convenience; more details are covered in the part-5 article regarding Internet and Broadcasting.

UHDTV started over 3 years ago as...

In early October, VIZIO and Dolby Laboratories announced pricing and availability of the VIZIO Reference Series TV sets, which the companies described as “the industry’s first-ever complete High Dynamic Range solution with Dolby Vision™ playback technology.” The series consists initially of two models, one of which you might be if you’ve had a good year, […]

There was a recent article by Andrew Robinson of Home Theater Review Magazine about TV calibration that touched a nerve with ISF and THX calibrators. I actually thought the article was on the spot but Andrew followed it up with a second article that gave a different perspective, not necessarily contradicting the first article, but apparently intended to make peace with calibrators that still had tension on their shoulders even after their massage sessions.

I have a different twist about this subject...

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)® today announced five new standards, ranging in topic from accessibility to 3D video to wireless charging, which are now available to guide designers as they develop innovative products for consumers. CEA also released a technical report that addresses television picture brightness.

The new standards are as follows...

Readers of this magazine have long been about examining the best of audio and video ... ... if not for their own consumption, then just to better understand how various Home Theatre products get to be "the best that they can be". Regular readers of video product reviews in these pages have come to understand that NO display product can fully realize its potential until it has been calibrated in the environment in which it lives - perhaps your living room.

Clearly, not all display devices calibrate equally well. There are several factors that impact the end result...

Onkyo USA has announced March deliveries of its first 3D-Ready home theater receivers and home theater in a box (HTiB) systems. The new models consist of three A/V receivers and three HTiB systems ranging in price from $299 to $599, and all of them support the new HDMI v1.4 connectivity standard for new 3D video displays and Audio Return Channel capabilities. All are exceptionally well equipped to provide a superior music, home theater sound and video experience, with high build-quality and offering excellent value.

The new TX-SR608 7.2-channel THX-Select2 Plus certified receiver has...

– HDMI Licensing, LLC, the agent responsible for licensing the High-Definition Multimedia Interface® (HDMI®) specification, today announced, on behalf of the HDMI Founders, the release of HDMI Specification Version 1.4a featuring key enhancements for 3D applications including the addition of mandatory 3D formats for broadcast content as well as the addition of the 3D format referred to as Top-and-Bottom. The complete HDMI Specification Version 1.4a, along with the 1.4a version of the Compliance Test Specification (CTS), is available to Adopters on the HDMI Adopter Extranet.

An extraction of the 3D portion of Specification Version 1.4a is available for public download on the HDMI Web site at...

Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging, announced today the Company has adopted an MPEG-2 Full HD (4:2:2) file-based recording codec for a new file-based professional video camera currently under development. The new Canon MPEG-2 codec will enable high-quality imaging and audio performance with up to 50 Mbps data recording and twice the color data of the HDV*1 profile format. File-based recording helps video operations realize greater efficiencies during post-production, making it an ideal format for many industry applications such as newsgathering, documentary filmmaking and event videography. The main features of the new Canon MPEG-2 codec include...

One cannot appreciate the enormity of this exhibition except in person. This was my fortieth CES – the first being in 1965 at the old American Hotel in NYC, called the EIA Convention at that time. Then as a young engineer with RCA, I was awestruck by two full floors of products – one floor with radio, phonograph and audio tape products and the other with television – mostly black and white models. Now, the CES occupies several square miles of Las Vegas convention space exhibiting and hosting presentations relative to all types of electronics products competing in the ever hungrier world-wide consumer electronics marketplace. But one factor remains the same as in 1965: television is the king. Video products continue to...

Simplay™ Labs, LLC, the leading solutions provider of technologies, testing programs, development tools, and interoperability and performance design standards for the high-definition (HD) consumer electronics industry, today announced a number of new initiatives in HDMI Specification Version 1.4 certification, test tools, and testing facilities. The continuing evolution of the HD ecosystem and complexities of HD features, along with the growth of HDMI-enabled devices, have driven the need for...

NXP Semiconductors today announced that its TV550 platform now offers direct support for 21:9 panels running at 60 Hz. NXP will be showing HD movies on a 21:9 display panel at the upcoming 2010 CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA in January. The demo will show different use cases that are possible with the TV550, such as full screen “true size” movies. In addition, the demo will show how interactive Internet applications such as widgets, newsfeeds, weather and Video on Demand can run in the remaining screen space, alongside a high-definition 16:9 image.

The NXP TV550 is a...

Motion flow processing has played a huge role in the marketing of LCD product, turning what used to be negative into an unnecessary marketing positive. At first it was 120 Hz processing and now the big hype is 240 Hz processing; bigger numbers infer better. The common misperception is that motion flow processing is all about compensating for LCD pixel speed when actually the main purpose is to remove the potentially objectionable strobe effect of 30 and 24 frame content that appears most strongly with high contrast displays, like an LCD. All displays suffer from this artifact to some degree with contrast ratio playing the greatest role. For a deeper understanding...

Several formats were introduced over the past few years to distribute pre-recorded HD content. Some of those are already discontinued; others were introduced at trade shows in the US (such as the Consumer Electronics Show, CES) but were implemented only overseas.


D-VHS

Pre-recorded HD content was available in the form of digital D-VHS videotapes before Blu-ray was established. The tapes were...

High quality HDTV can be broadcasted using the 6 MHz channel-slot of one analog NTSC channel, but with over 9 times its resolution quality. The NTSC image is made of 480ix450 viewable picture elements per video frame composed of two interlaced fields and delivered at a rate of 60 fields (30 frames) per second.

Most HD broadcast compressed with MPEG-2 is transmitted as interlaced 1080i with 2 million+ pixels per video frame (1080x1920 pixels), each frame is composed of two interlaced 540-line fields delivered at the rate of 60 fields per second (30 frames).

Some HD broadcasts use...

This series of three articles analyzes the current and future market for HD, the methods of distribution and the capabilities of the digital technology to distribute HD content to meet consumer expectations. This technology must also support other quantity oriented businesses and services that can potentially degrade the original HD vision and affect those that invested in HDTV equipment under the reasonable expectation of viewing uncompromised HD quality, not just digital. This is a dilemma of quantity vs. quality when DTV permits the implementation of both, sharing the same bandwidth.

HD content is defined in this article as...

Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE:TXN) today announced a new Internet Protocol (IP) camera reference design that provides low power, high definition (HD) video processing for the video surveillance market. The DM368IPNC-MT5 IP camera reference design with H.264 main profile 1080p at 30 frames per second (fps) offers industry-leading compression in a full HD solution, with the complete camera utilizing only three Watts. Based on a new DaVinci(TM) video processor, the IP camera reference design provides 30 percent more host processing performance over the previous generation. This overall performance boost allows the camera to support 720p at 60 fps for multiple video formats including H.264 and MPEG-4, as well as MJPEG at five Megapixels (MP) at 15 fps. It also supports multi-streaming video proce ...

Motorola, Inc.'s Home and Networks Mobility business (NYSE:MOT) today revealed its next generation encoding platform. This high-performance video processing platform supports both MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 standard-definition (SD) and high-definition (HD) encoding and transcoding and has been designed to meet future processing demands of both 1080P/50Hz and 1080P/60Hz resolutions using the MPEG-4 format.

The powerful compression engine supports...

Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. today exhibits the future of home theater innovation - a network entertainment concept player, code named "Project ET," that encompasses high quality audio and video playback, Internet access and home theater control capabilities all within a single set-top device. Pioneer® differentiates its technology concept from existing players in the market by letting consumers combine their personal music, movies and photo collections with access to a choice of online content services, social networking applications and online purchasing sites. Pioneer's concept incorporates...

DivX, Inc. (NASDAQ:DIVX) , a digital media company, today announced a license agreement for next-generation DivX Plus(TM) HD technology with Panasonic Corporation. Panasonic plans to incorporate DivX Plus HD technology into its UniPhier semiconductor chips, enabling consumer electronics (CE) devices such as digital TVs, Blu-ray disc players and in-car players to playback DivX Plus HD H.264 video in the MKV container at high-definition resolutions up to 1080p.

Known for great performance, visual quality and interoperability on any DivX Certified device, DivX technology gives consumers...

"Cognitive Radio." What a strange, oblique name for one of the greatest technology advances in telecommunications since Ma Bell decided that ones and zeros made better use of our precious spectrum (over both wired and wireless media) than wavy, wriggly voltage changes. Clearly, the academics who coined the name failed PR101. Why not call it "Smart Radio" - because that's what it is - really smart radio. So, I'll compromise in this wheeze on the subject by cowardly retreating into the technical acronym morass - henceforth tagging "Cognitive Radio" as "COR" and its TV version as "COTV."

The precise definition of COR...