HD TECHNOLOGY

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HD TECHNOLOGY

• Juan Carlos Rosero

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HISTORY

• The term high definition once described a series
  of television systems originating from the late
  1930s however, these systems were only high
  definition when compared to earlier systems that
  were based on mechanical systems with as few as
  30 lines of resolution.

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Great Britain

• The British high definition TV service started
  trials in August 1936 and a regular service in
  November 1936 using both the (mechanical) Baird
  240 line and (electronic) Marconi-EMI 405 line
  (377i) systems. The Baird system was discontinued
  in February 1937.

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France

• In 1938 France followed with their own 441 line
  system, variants of which were also used by a
  number of other countries. The US NTSC system
  joined in 1941. In 1949 France introduced an even
  higher resolution standard at 819 lines (768i), a
  system that would be high definition even by
  today's standards, but it was monochrome only.

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Main differences

• All of these systems used interlacing and a 43
  aspect ratio except the 240 line system which was
  progressive (actually described at the time by
  the technically correct term 'sequential') and
  the 405 line system which started as 54 and
  later changed to 43. The 405 line system adopted
  the (at that time) revolutionary idea of
  interlaced scanning to overcome the flicker
  problem of the 240 line with its 25 Hz frame
  rate.

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Color TV

• Color broadcasts started at similarly higher
  resolutions, first with the US NTSC color system
  in 1953, which was compatible with the earlier
  BW systems and therefore had the same 525 lines
  (480i) of resolution. European standards did not
  follow until the 1960s, when the PAL and SECAM
  colour systems were added to the monochrome 625
  line (576i) broadcasts.

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Analog HD Systems (France)

• French 819 lines system (768i) was used only on
  VHF for the first French TV channel. It first
  started transmission in 1949 and was discontinued
  in 1985.

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Analog HD Systems (URSS)

• In 1958, the Soviet Union developed ?ransformator
  (Russian ?????????????, Transformer), the first
  high-resolution (definition) television system
  capable of producing an image composed of 1,125
  lines of resolution aimed at providing
  teleconferencing for military command. It was a
  research project and the system was never
  deployed in the military or broadcasting.

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Analog Systems (Japan)

• In 1969, the Japanese state broadcaster NHK first
  developed consumer high-definition television
  Hi-Vision or MUSE with a 53 aspect ratio, a
  rather wider screen format than the usual 43
  standard. The system required about twice the
  bandwidth of the existing NTSC system but
  provided about four times the resolution
  (1080i/1125 lines). Satellite test broadcasts
  started in 1989, with regular testing starting in
  1991 and regular broadcasting of BS-9ch commenced
  on 25 November 1994, which featured commercial
  and NHK programming.

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Analog Systems (USA)

• In 1981, the MUSE system was demonstrated for the
  first time in the United States, using the same
  53 aspect ratio as the Japanese system. Upon
  visiting a demonstration of MUSE in Washington,
  US President Ronald Reagan was most impressed and
  officially declared it "a matter of national
  interest" to introduce HDTV to the USA.

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Analog Systems (USA)

• Several systems were proposed as the new standard
  for the USA, including the Japanese MUSE system,
  but all were rejected by the FCC because of their
  higher bandwidth requirements. At this time, the
  number of television channels was growing rapidly
  and bandwidth was already a problem. A new
  standard had to be more efficient, needing less
  bandwidth for HDTV than the existing NTSC.

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Analog HD Unification

• In 1983, the International Telecommunication
  Union's radio telecommunications sector (ITU-R)
  set up a working party (IWP11/6) with the aim of
  setting a single international HDTV standard. One
  of the thornier issues concerned a suitable
  frame/field refresh rate, the world already
  having split into two camps, 25/50Hz and 30/60Hz,
  related by reasons of picture stability to the
  frequency of their main electrical supplies.

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Analog HD Unification

• The IWP11/6 working party considered many views
  and through the 1980s served to encourage
  development in a number of video digital
  processing areas, not least conversion between
  the two main frame/field rates using motion
  vectors, which led to further developments in
  other areas. While a comprehensive HDTV standard
  was not in the end established, agreement on the
  aspect ratio was achieved.

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Analog HD Unification

• Initially the existing 53 aspect ratio had been
  the main candidate but, due to the influence of
  widescreen cinema, the aspect ratio 169 (1.78)
  eventually emerged as being a reasonable
  compromise between 53 (1.67) and the common 1.85
  widescreen cinema format. The 169 ratio was
  chosen as being the geometric mean of 43,
  Academy ratio, and 2.41, the widest cinema
  format in common use, in order to minimize wasted
  screen space when displaying content with a
  variety of aspect ratios.

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Analog HD Unification

• An aspect ratio of 169 was duly agreed at the
  first meeting of the IWP11/6 working party at the
  BBC's Research and Development establishment in
  Kingswood Warren. The resulting ITU-R
  Recommendation ITU-R BT.709-2 ("Rec. 709")
  includes the 169 aspect ratio, a specified
  colorimetry, and the scan modes 1080i (1,080
  actively interlaced lines of resolution) and
  1080p (1,080 progressively scanned lines). The
  current Freeview HD trials use MBAFF, which
  contains both progressive and interlaced content
  in the same encoding.

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Analog HD Unification

• It also includes the alternative 14401152 HDMAC
  scan format. According to some reports, a mooted
  750line (720p) format (720 progressively scanned
  lines) was viewed by some at the ITU as an
  enhanced television format rather than a true
  HDTV format, and so was not included, although
  19201080i and 1280720p systems for a range of
  frame and field rates were defined by several US
  SMPTE standards.)

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Demise of analog HD Systems

• This limited standarization of HDTV did not lead
  to its adoption, principally for technical and
  economic reasons. NHK's MUSE required over four
  times the bandwidth of a standard-definition
  broadcast, and despite efforts made to reduce it
  to about twice that of SDTV, it was still only
  distributable by satellite with one channel
  shared on a daily basis between seven
  broadcasters. Japan remained the only country
  with successful public broadcast analog HDTV,
  starting in 2000 in Japan, and ended in October
  2007.

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New Standards

• Since the formal adoption of Digital Video
  Broadcasting's (DVB) widescreen HDTV transmission
  modes in the early 2000s the 525-line NTSC (and
  PAL-M) systems as well as the European 625-line
  PAL and SECAM systems are now regarded as
  standard definition television systems. In
  Australia, the 625-line digital progressive
  system (with 576 active lines) is officially
  recognized as high definition.

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Digital Video Broadcasting

• DVB is a suite of internationally accepted open
  standards for digital television. DVB standards
  are maintained by the DVB Project, an
  international industry consortium with more than
  270 members, and they are published by a Joint
  Technical Committee (JTC) of European
  Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI),
  European Committee for Electrotechnical
  Standardization (CENELEC) and European
  Broadcasting Union (EBU).

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DVB Transmission

• DVB systems distribute data using a variety of
  approaches, including
• satellite DVB-S, DVB-S2 and DVB-SH
• DVB-SMATV for distribution via SMATV
• cable DVB-C, DVB-C2
• terrestrial television DVB-T, DVB-T2
• digital terrestrial television for handhelds
  DVB-H, DVB-SH
• microwave using DTT (DVB-MT), the MMDS (DVB-MC),
  and/or MVDS standards (DVB-MS)

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ATSC Standards

• The ATSC standard was developed in the early
  1990s by the Grand Alliance, a consortium of
  electronics and telecommunications companies that
  assembled to develop a specification for what is
  now known as HDTV. ATSC formats also include
  standard-definition formats, although initially
  only HDTV services were launched in the digital
  format.

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ATSC RANGE

• The high definition television standards defined
  by the ATSC produce wide screen 169 images up to
  19201080 pixels in size more than six times
  the display resolution of the earlier standard.
  However, many different image sizes are also
  supported.

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Rise of digital compression

• Both ATSC and DVB were based on the MPEG-2
  standard. The DVB-S2 standard is based on the
  newer and more efficient H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
  compression standards. Common for all DVB
  standards is the use of highly efficient
  modulation techniques for further reducing
  bandwidth, and foremost for reducing
  receiver-hardware and antenna requirements.

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Digital HD (USA)

• HDTV technology was introduced in the United
  States in the 1990s by the Digital HDTV Grand
  Alliance. The first public HDTV broadcast in the
  United States occurred on July 23, 1996. The
  American Advanced Television Systems Committee
  (ATSC) HDTV system had its public launch on
  October 29, 1998, during the live coverage of
  astronaut John Glenn's return mission to space on
  board the Space Shuttle Discovery.

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Digital HD (Europe)

• Although HDTV broadcasts had been demonstrated in
  Europe since the early 1990s, the first regular
  broadcasts started on January 1, 2004 when the
  Belgian company Euro1080 launched the HD1 channel
  with the traditional Vienna New Year's Concert.

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Digital HD (Europe)

• These first European HDTV broadcasts used the
  1080i format with MPEG-2 compression on a DVB-S
  signal from SES Astra's 1H satellite at Europe's
  main DTH Astra 19.2E position. Euro1080
  transmissions later changed to MPEG-4/AVC
  compression on a DVB-S2 signal in line with
  subsequent broadcast channels in Europe.

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WQHD (1440p)

• The Wide Quad High Definition, display standard
  is a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels in a 169
  aspect ratio. It is four times the resolution of
  the 720p display standard, hence the name. Their
  high pixel counts and heavy display hardware
  requirements mean that there are currently few
  LCD monitors which have pixel counts at these
  levels. It is a non-standard resolution found in
  some displays, such as the Dell UltraSharp U2711
  and the 27" iMac.

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QFHD (2160p)

• Quad Full High Definition) is a non-standard
  display resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels arranged
  in a 169 aspect ratio. It is four times the
  resolution of the 1080p display standard, hence
  the name.
• In early 2008, Samsung revealed a
  proof-of-concept 82-inch LCD TV set capable of
  this resolution and LG has demonstrated an
  84-inch displayEyevis produces a 56" LCD named
  EYELCD 56 QHD HD while Toshiba makes the P56QHD,
  and Sony the SRM-L560, all which can deliver a
  resolution of 3840 x 2160.

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Super Hi-Vision

• Super Hi-Vision (also known as 4320p, 8K, Ultra
  High Definition Television (UHDTV), and Ultra
  High Definition Video (UHDV)) is an experimental
  digital video format, currently proposed by NHK
  of Japan, the BBC, and RAI.

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Super Hi-Vision

• Sky also appears to be interested in the
  technology. During IBC 2008 Japan's NHK, Italy's
  RAI, the BBC, RTE, Sony, Samsung, and Panasonic
  (with various partners) demonstrated the first
  ever public live transmission of Super Hi-Vision,
  from London to the conference site in Amsterdam.
• In addition, it was demonstrated at the BBC's
  Media Centre in West London in early October
  2008. The BBC has been looking into the use of
  its Dirac codec with Super Hi-Vision.