MPEG破折号 and HEVC Dominated the Discussions at IBC

The weather certainly cooperated in Amsterdam last week for the 2012 IBC convention, which grew in both the number of attendees and the significance for streaming media producers.

这个节目, 在九月的第一周举行, marked its twenty-year anniversary at the sprawling RAI convention center in Amsterdam Zuid (south) with an increase in visitor and exhibitors attending the show to almost 51,000年总. This number has continued to grow each year over the past decade, and even though the growth from last year was only 500 more attendees, the fact that IBC pulled this off in a stagnant global economy is testament to the ongoing interest in broadcast -- including streaming broadcasts.

与澳大利亚国民银行, which is over twice the size in terms of attendance, IBC has a high ratio of exhibitors to attendees -- a 1:2 ratio, with an average of one exhibitor for every two visitors. This means IBC visitors have the opportunity to stop and ask questions in more detail than they do at NAB. One often hears the word "civilized" when describing the pace of IBC.

So what was new and interesting for this year's attendees, the majority of which were from western Europe and the United States? From a streaming production standpoint, two areas drove the discussion: DASH and HEVC.

MPEG破折号

MPEG破折号, 或HTTP上的动态流, 是在2011年底批准的吗, so this is the first IBC where vendors could both openly commit to the standards-based delivery scheme and also showcase demonstrations of interoperability between once-competing products.

真正的网络, 利用Helix服务器技术, 展示DASH集成, delivering streams from a yet-to-be-released Helix update to an Ericsson player.

Adobe和Wowza, in their respective Adobe Media Server and Wowza Media Server software, 也展示了DASH. 作为DASH发起人小组的成员, both companies were involved in a series of three linear demonstrations of limited interoperability during the recent 2012 London Olympics.

Hosted by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and VRT, a Belgian public broadcaster, a number of DASH推广小组编码由Elemental提供, 谐波, 及媒体Excel, while streaming origins were provided by Wowza and CodeShop servers. 在加密方面, this feature was provided by Amsterdam-based CodeShop and Austin-based BuyDRM, with the latter providing integrated DRM via specialized Android and iOS applications. Adobe also provided Android, Mac, and Windows client players.

测试是线性的, 有限的互操作性时尚, 基于特定的功能. For instance, Elemental's servers both encode and encapsulate the H.264 content in to DASH-compliant segments, meaning that a media server is not required. 像这样, 即使Adobe提供了Adobe Media Server, its pairing with Elemental was from a DASH-equipped Flash player standpoint only, with content being served from a standard HTTP Apache server. 现场表演结束了，在Flash中播放DASH内容的例子仍然可以看到.

HEVC

No visit to IBC would be complete without a look at next-generation acquisition and compression technologies. 今年也不例外, with NHK showing off yet another revision of its Super High Vision experimental camera chip and video screen playback, including recorded clips from the 2012 London Olympics that were incredibly lifelike and relatively smooth. We'll cover Super High Vision in a bit more detail in a subsequent article, as the 120-Mhz capture and playback will have a trickle-down effect for streaming.

The major discussion at IBC surrounding video encoding, though, was the merits of H.264与即将到来的H.265，即高效视频编码. The argument raged, from the show floor to late-night dinners, regarding whether the move to H.265是过早的. The discussions mimicked a discussion a decade ago surrounding the merits of MPEG-2 versus MPEG-4, as MPEG-4's release soon after broadcasters had adopted MPEG-2 Transport Stream provided neither financial nor technical incentive to switch, given the fact that the MPEG-4 first-generation codec yielded only nominal quality improvements over MPEG-2. 我们将继续关注这个话题，因为H.265/HEVC标准仍处于草案阶段.

That's a quick wrap-up of the pertinent details surrounding IBC. 我们要报道的下一个大节目是流媒体欧洲, which takes place in London on October 15 and 16, 2012.