ASIA-PACIFIC BROADCASTING

Choice can be difficult — both in a restaurant and when ordering a professional integrated receiver/decoder (IRD). The options are: Select what you want and just pay for that; or pay a fixed price and have everything that is on offer. À la carte is fine if you know exactly what you want ... but many people don’t.

No, Tandberg Television has not gone into the food business, but it has adopted restaurateur-marketing techniques. Its latest professional IRD is not available as a ‘do-anything’ unit for one price but instead your à la carte order will be constructed for you out of modules.  

The Tandberg RX8200 advanced modular receiver is a flexible, feature-rich, multi-format professional IRD. It is ordered through an à la carte selection of options and interfaces. This concept of total configurability allows the user to get precisely the feature set required without the unit being loaded with additional functionality. The benefit is that the user pays for just the features and functionality required.

However, this pre-supposes that every broadcast engineer knows not only the current business plan but future trends as well. Of course, the RX8200 can be retrofitted with additional modules, but pulling units out of service for re-fits and upgrades will be inconvenient. So know what you want beforehand — and know it exactly.

The feature set to choose from is very impressive and wide-ranging. Receiver modules exist for DVB-S2 capability, including 16APSK; a symbol rate range from 1-60 mega symbols per second (MSps); data reception up to 100Mbps of IP MPE; plus, of course, reception and decoding of all current MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 compression options — with provision for future developments.  

Tandberg made much of the new MPEG-4 profiles at 2009 NAB Show in April. These include High profile, High 10 profile, and the High 4:2:2 profile (also known as both MPEG-4 HD 4:2:2 and the fidelity extension profile).

Early MPEG-4 4:2:2 products are now coming into the market supporting the High profile (MPEG-4 4:2:2, eight-bit precision). These products deliver some bandwidth saving when compared to MPEG-2, but the major benefit of using MPEG-4 4:2:2 will be through the use of the High 4:2:2 profile.

The High 4:2:2 profile applies 10-bit precision and supports 1080p 50/60. It delivers superior video quality that surpasses other MPEG-4 4:2:2 and MPEG-2 4:2:2 profiles.

I followed the release of Tandberg’s new top-of-the-line RX8200 advanced modular receiver with a couple of questions directly to Roger Bolton’s (Tandberg’s vice-president of business development) compression systems team about the capability of the RX8200 to decode the new MPEG-4 High 4:2:2 profile.

Carl Furgusson, who runs the product-management group replied that “the RX8200 IRD does not decode the new MPEG-4 High 4:2:2 profile today”, adding that “as the newest flagship professional receiver in the Tandberg TV receiver portfolio, the modular building block approach of the RX8200 will allow this product to be expanded to support MPEG-4 High 4:2:2 profile or other video format or profiles in the future by the addition of appropriate decoder modules”.

Furgusson went on to explain: “There is no MPEG-4 High 4:2:2 10-bit encoder-decoder combination available or shipping today, and will not likely be available until end-2009 or early-2010. The main reason for this is that there is no off-the-shelf silicon decode solution available to equipment designers as it is not a profile anticipated for DTH applications and, therefore, equipment designers are having to implement their own decode solutions using alternative silicon such as FPGA (field-programmable gate array) or DSP (digital signal processing).”

So, do not attempt to order all the configurable options of the RX8200 IRD just yet!

However, the RX8200 covers a wide spectrum of contribution and distribution applications. Configurability allows the receiver to address multi-service transport-stream turnaround applications, or the unit can be configured as a broadcaster-to-broadcaster backbone device in, for example, an MPEG-2 SD 4:2:2, or as an MPEG-4 HD 4:2:0 monitoring/turnaround device. It can also be used as a simple multi-service decryptor or MPEG-2 SD 4:2:0 monitoring decoder, right up to the new ground-breaking MPEG-4 High (HD) 4:2:2 10-bit 1080p 50/60 (next year).

It will be the ability of the RX8200 to receive the extra tier of video quality introduced by MPEG-4 High (HD) 4:2:2 10-bit 1080p 50/60 that will be exciting. This will be particularly relevant for premier high-level contribution applications. The RX8200 is unique in supporting this mode, in combination with other advanced features such as a complete selection of conditional-access options, and input and output interfaces that can be ordered à la carte.

The advanced modular receiver is backward-compatible, and supports all MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 standards.

As part of the à la carte choice, the system offers the latest DVB-S2 capability, including 16APSK, multi-transport stream within one RF carrier, and a massive symbol rate range that covers 1-60MSps. The RX8200 capability does not stop with satellite inputs. Also offered as part of the à la carte selection are sophisticated IP transport stream inputs and outputs as well as the capability to stream up to 100Mbps of IP MPE multi-protocol encapsulated high-speed data files alongside real-time decoded video.

Meanwhile, NTT Electronics of Japan has also announced the production of an advanced high-end professional IRD for use in broadcast contribution and distribution, including DSNG (digital satellite newsgathering).

The new NTT Electronics HVD600 IRD supports multi-format functionality — MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 and MPEG-2, 4:2:2/4:2:0 and HDTV/SDTV. It comes equipped with a variety of features, including HD/SD resolution conversion. The demodulator supports DVB-S, DVB-DSNG, and DVB-S2 for high-performance satellite transmission.

Newtec has been selected by NTT Electronics to be the DVB-S2 technology partner for the development of the new HVD6100 IRD. The project uses the Newtec NTC/7044 high-end DVB-S2 demodulator board, which can process data rates up to 155Mbps and operate in 16APSK and 32APSK higher-order demodulation schemes.  

The HVD6100 supports not only constant coding and modulation (CCM) but also variable coding and modulation (VCM). Later this year, it will support adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) as well.

As the HVD6100 has IP and ASI inputs, it can be used for high-quality HDTV/SDTV video- and audio-transmission applications. HD-SD down-conversion ranges from 1080i, or 720p, to 576i, or 480i.

Koichi Masaki, general manager of multimedia systems, NTT Electronics, comments: “We are extremely proud of the breakthroughs we have made during the development of the HVD6100 IRD. “We greatly appreciate the fast response and dedicated support we have received from Newtec.

“The company is recognised as an industry leader in the development of DVB-S2 technology, and its demodulator board met all of our requirements.”

Max d’Oreye, vice-president of Newtec Professional Equipment, added: “We are delighted to be working with NTT Electronics on this broadcasting project. The extended capabilities of our DVB-S2 demodulator boards fit perfectly the very-high-performance IRD product of NTT Electronics.”

 

 

 

 

 

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