HDTV Almanac - 3DTV Broadcasts Work on 2D HDTVs

[alfredpoor]

According to an article in TV Technology, a consortium of Italian broadcasters and technology companies has come up with a way to broadcast 3D video content over a television channel in such a way that a standard 2D HDTV could still show a high definition image.
The key to the technique is that two 720p images [...]

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[videograbber]

Thanks for another interesting post, Alfred.

> That approach would mean that the 2D image would only have half the image data of a high definition image. <

Yuck.

> in such a way that a standard 2D HDTV could still show a high definition image <

Which is contradicted by "half the image data". So now not only do we have stations bit-starving their HD content with multicasting (the local FOX affiliate here is doing "HD" on their main channel in 7-8 MBit/s ), but this offers a new half-def "high-def". Wunderbar. "High-Def" is rapidly becoming meaningless.

> ...it could be a long time before such an approach will be implemented by broadcasters <

That's good, because taking a quality hit like that is completely unacceptable.

> The key to the technique is that two 720p images (left and right) can be combined and sent in a single 1080p frame. <

I'm not familiar with Euro standards, but we don't have 1080p frames here in the US, nor any way to broadcast 1080p. It's either 1080i or 720p.

- Tim

[Rodolfo]

This method of transmission was presented at the recent 3D workshop at Columbia University in NYC, among other methods of transmission. I made my comments at that presentation regarding the actual spatial resolution loss of both the 2D and 3D images, and also about the not indicated frame rate of the format as specified, which one would expect it to be at 60fps, the beauty of 720p, but is not in this case because the 1080 frame is merely used as a shell of transmission of the packaged images but at its own frame rate.

Regarding the claim that this method does not lose half of the resolution as the other methods do, a simple math will show that is actually worst.

Each 1080p original image (1920x1080 = 2,073,600 pixels x video frame of spatial resolution) is transmitted as 720p (1280x720= 921,600 pixels x video frame of spatial resolution).

Regardless if the image is displayed as 2D or 3D, there is a net loss of 1,152,000 pixels per video frame (2,073,600 – 921,600), or 56% of the original image, which is actually worst than the top-bottom or side-by-side 50% loss.

However, the actual benefit of this method of transmission is not about resolution but about a broadcaster not needing to allocate one channel for the 3D image for 3D displays and another channel with the 2D version of the same content for legacy HDTV displays.

Bandwidth utilization is the driver of this approach and is maximized by using a single channel but at the price of 56% of image resolution loss, a bit higher than losing 50% but less demanding than been forced to allocate dual channels to transmit both versions separately.

Best Regards,

Rodolfo La Maestra

[alice]

Yes Rudolfo: For Broadcasters , saving bandwidth is key as it relates to saving MONEY.

Systems like this are just what we need. More hd lite being passed off as value added for the consumer.

The industry needs to improve quality , redesign business model and not cheapened the product.