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Old 7th November 2022, 13:29   #60  |  Link
excellentswordfight
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Join Date: Jul 2017
Posts: 322
Quote:
Originally Posted by FranceBB View Post
Great piece of history indeed by our Ben.
If there's someone I'd point my finger against (as an "antagonist") in history that would be Sony and their MPEG-2 pursuit 'till the bitter end.
If it wasn't for Sony, MPEG-2 would have been dead in the water, but after the bitter disappointment of MPEG-4 ASP (i.e XVID) in 2001, most broadcasters didn't gamble with MPEG-4 Part 10 (i.e H.264) in 2004 for SD contents (720x480 29,970i - 720x576 25i) and decided to stick with MPEG-2. Back then, formats like IMX50 based on MPEG-2 All Intra 50 Mbit/s 4:2:2 were popular for SD files.
In 2006, as little as 2 years after H.264 was introduced, the world moved to HD (and then FULL HD) and Sony made the XDCAM set of standard which is essentially MPEG-2 for both HD and FULL HD.
Guess what happened? Many companies wanted "stability" and adopted it instead of H.264, but that was a big, big mistake. As result, most broadcasters are still using MPEG-2 for FULL HD contents to this very day and are hog-tied to this ancient, no longer supported, unoptimized codec with banding problems and what not.
If Sony didn't do this, the world would have moved to H.264 for HD and FULL HD and MPEG-2 would have been dead by now.
In XDCAM 50 defense, when it comes to well adopted standards with a broad compliance there is still no HD standard that that does 1080i at the same or lower bitrate that is viable as house format! AVC-I and XAVC-I is 100Mbps, and when re-compressed for contribution at limited bitrates it makes pretty much no difference for the end consumer. The GOP versions of AVC/HEVC is not universally supported in the same way as xdcam and the intra flavors of AVC.

I think its crazy that the "smallest" viable house format for UHD XAVC-I Class300 is 500Mbps (50fps mode for pal regions), thats a 10x increase from xdcam 50! Tbh thats absurd given that mpeg-2 is over two decades old, and we still cant "save" space in the broadcasting world. This makes transitions to things like 1080p and 2160p very expensive to migrate to, so most just stick to 1080i/XDCAM. I tried to explain this to management when calculating on on storage cost for UHD migration, cause they couldnt understand why UHD would take up more than 4x than our old XDCAM format.

It also doesnt help that that hw-decode and encode of 10bit 4:2:2 formats is abysmal. Like it would make so much sense for a AVC/HEVC mezz standard to also have good hw support in gpu-solutions, without the need for expensive purpose built acc-cards. If there were full out support in qsync/nvenc/VCE and implemented in a broad amount of applactions as NLEs etc for fast encode and decode I think it would accelerate adoption alot. It would also lower requirement for realtime ingest a lot.

Last edited by excellentswordfight; 7th November 2022 at 13:41.
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