In-Depth Review of Advanced Coding Technologies for Low Bit Rate Broadcast Applications

This paper considers video and audio compression techniques that have been developed since the ratification of the MPEG-2 standard and focuses on how the bit rate savings supplied by these techniques make them attractive for low bit rate broadcast applications. To allow a more in-depth review, two competitive technologies are used as examples: MPEG-4, representing the standards-based approach and Windows Media 9 Series representing the vendor-driven approach. They are compared with the benchmark of a state-of-the-art MPEG-2 hardware encoder At the lower bit rate range the new video techniques achieved a significant reduction in bit rate for the same quality as the MPEG-2 encoding and the rate of fall-off with quality as the bit rate reduced was less with the advanced coding The best quality for bit rate was achieved either by MPEG-4 AVC (Main Profile) or WMV9 depending on the material Percentage bit rate savings for audio is less important for the broadcaster as the audio represents less than 15% of the total bandwidth However the new technologies can allow reasonable operation in the region of 64 to 96 kbits/sec with similar quality to the original MPEG-1 Layer II at 256 kbits/sec allowing an increase in video bit rate and hence viewing quality.

Print ISSN

1545-0279

Electronic ISSN

2160-2492

Published

2004-12

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/J16246