Once in a while I come across a technical debate that fires me up. Usually I’m just mildly so. I’ve always subscribed to the idea that there are always alternatives to “the way we’ve always done it”, and generally I find that thinking outside the box is a virtue as an engineer. There are times, though, when manufacturers or others in the business push ideas or standards with the primary purpose of selling new equipment, rather than to enable a substantive improvement over the status quo.
For several years, the movie industry has used a digital video codec called “Motion-JPEG2000″ to transport digital files of first run movies to theatre facilities. It’s been several years since actual “film” has been used in the most modern theatre complexes. Older projections systems do still exist, but they are a dying breed. Most modern theatre projection systems are digital, and use data much in the same manner as your digital television set to produce picture and sound. Motion-JPEG is a very good codec, particularly at high bit rates with mild compression, and this is why the movie industry uses it so extensively. A single download to a movie theatre is then shown many times with very high quality. This codec however, does less well at higher compression levels when trying to conserve bandwidth or disc space.
The television industry has largely used “MPEG2″ or “MPEG4″ compression for distribution, chosen largely by embedded technology in a given system. Most distribution companies (cable, satellite, or fiber) have been moving to the newer “MPEG4″ technology because it’s a very effective codec that has high quality and lower bandwidth requirements. (See the discussions on MPEG here and MPEG4 specifically here).
Now a number of manufacturers are strongly proposing moving the JPEG standard into television distribution as well–a bad idea on several counts. First, Motion-JPEG, while a great standard, is not materially better than the H.264 MPEG4 codec at the moderate levels of compression required to minimize bandwidth constraints or conserve digital storage space. Second, the distribution model is fundamentally different in that cable and satellite systems carry multiple digital streams in real time, thereby requiring judicious use of available bandwidth. Third, adopting this standard would instantly obsolete a great deal of the infrastructure present in the television distribution industry.
If the JPEG codec were a quantum leap in quality or efficiency, that would be a different story. But this doesn’t appear to be the case. Opinions vary, of course (see this highly technical discussion if you’re interested), but in my opinion, this appears to be a technology in search of a new home, and I’m not sure the landlord is on board.
Until next time…
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