We have managed to glean some more details of the Perseus compression technology from V-Nova (V-Nova’s Perseus Lowers UltraHD Bandwidth Requirements). Digitaltveurope.net reports that at the technology launch, a stream of 300Mbps was shown for contribution purposes (compared with a 1Gbps JPEG2000 stream). A demonstration of UltraHD at 8Mbps was compared to a 21-27Mbps HEVC source. A-Nova claims that HD video can be viewed at below 500kbps without picture or continuity loss.
Inside Satellite reports that the initial group of licensors is likely to include GE, Technicolor, Dolby, Philips and Mitsubishi (Broadcom, Intel, Sky, Hitachi Data Systems and the EBU were mentioned last week). The paper also said that there are no plans for standardisation, with licensing available based on the company’s “clean” ip.
Hitachi Data Systems has already got a .pdf online of a P-link video gateway based on Perseus that is intended to connect high quality video (up to 4096 x 2160 at 60p is supported) for transmission over ip links. The document says that “visually lossless” 10bit 4:2:2 YCbCr sampling is used and is 2.5x to 3.5x lower bitrate than JPEG2000. Bitrates quoted are 15-100Mbps for HD, 20-100MBps for 3G-HDTV and 30-200Mbps for UltraHD. Sky Italia, which will be one of the first users of Perseus for contribution, is quoted as endorsing the product.
Analyst Comment
Normally, if we had the kind of claims that we are seeing from V-Nova, I’d be adding the caveat “if they can do what they say that they can do”, but in this case, the list of supporters really means that this technology could genuinely shift the paradigm for video streaming. So far, we can’t find the “gotcha”. Anyway, it’s bound to be a hot topic at NAB. (BR)
