The H.264 Report: Siemens Advanced Set Top Box with Web Browsing & VOIP
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Mar 11, 2005 at 12:02am
In recognition of the forthcoming Mac OS X 10.4’s (“Tiger”) commitment to MPEG-4 Part 10 with H.264/AVC, Macsimum News has created the H.264 Report along with our reporter News2Me. There’s an emerging H.264 ecosystem of industry players committed to this next generation open standard and we feel what’s good for H.264/AVC is good for the Mac platform going forward and therefore will support those players in this new report.
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Slimming cure for digital videos
In the future, high-speed DSL lines will no longer be the sole preserve of computer users. The TV set will also become a multimedia device, capable of downloading videos for instant viewing via telephone cables. Up until now the required data volumes have been too large for transmission with good picture quality. Researchers from Siemens and MainConcept have now developed a system applying the latest video standards to compress the huge streams of video data.
Mobile telephony is already so popular that a sizeable proportion of telephone traffic in Germany is no longer conducted from an indoor telephone, but from a cell phone away from the home or office. This is a good reason for the telecommunications companies to look for new ways of using the fixed network. One technology that looks likely to become established over the next few years is so-called home entertainment systems.
The idea is to connect the television set to the telephone line by means of a supplementary device, the set-top box, thereby transforming it into a multifunctional device. Users will be able to call up Internet pages by remote control without any programming or computer knowledge whatsoever, conduct video telephone conferences or call up videos. The last of these functions, video-on-demand, looks particularly promising. It would make visits to the video rental store a thing of the past. Instead, you’ll be able to watch your favorite film on the Internet over the telephone line simply by pressing a button on the remote control. The charge for watching the video would then be billed conveniently with your next telephone bill.
Up until now the transmitting of videos has been a problem. Not even the high transmission performance of DSL connections is good enough to transmit the large volumes of video data to the television set fast enough to generate an acceptable picture. A compression standard known as H.264 or MPEG-4 AVC., halves the data volume of the digital video.
Siemens researchers have succeeded in replacing MPEG-2 with H.264 within the information stream while leaving the MPEG-2 transport stream unchanged. “We began by looking for existing software for H.264 compression and analyzing it,” said Marcel Wagner, project leader at CT. The team then had to load an MPEG-2 transport stream with H.264 video data, which posed a major challenge. The problem is that the data volume of a video signal changes constantly. With moving scenes, for example, a large number of picture elements change at once and the data volume increases.
The data volume for still pictures, on the other hand, is relatively small. “Our object was to generate a uniform data stream despite these fluctuations, or in other words to pack the data into equal sized packets, as it were, and send them off at equal intervals,” said Wagner. “At present there’s no other solution available on the market that can do that.”
Apart from the H.264 expertise, it was mainly the relevant experience with MPEG-2 transport streams that gave the Siemens developers the crucial lead over other companies. This expertise allows the video bits to be slightly time-shifted without this change being perceptible to the human eye. In this way, it’s possible despite fluctuating image data volumes to generate consistent data flows that can be transmitted over the existing DSL infrastructure without great problems. Together with a new set-top box developed by Siemens that can decode the H.264 standard, the digital information can be reassembled into a smoothly moving picture on the TV set.
Noteworthy
Siemens Journal March 2005: If you’re the type that likes to read about “what’s in-the-works,” then you’ll enjoy this journal’s three chapters: 1) A look at the future 2) Freedom and Flexibility and 3) On the winning side – which is about the Always-On society. If you enjoyed this journal, you could get their last 11 back-issues here.
A few years ago, the International Organization for Standardization selected the QuickTime file format as the basis for MPEG-4. As a result, QuickTime embraced open standards and now leads the market in MPEG-4, 3GPP and 3GPP2 content creation and playback. Apple continues to build on this commitment to open standards by incorporating H.264/AVC directly into QuickTime. And since H.264/AVC is an open standard, any company in the world can create devices—such as mobile phones, set-top boxes, DVD players and more — that will work with QuickTime. Get ready for QuickTime with H.264/AVC to change the digital video universe. You’ll be able to experience this addition to QuickTime in Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”).
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
