The team for video coding at the Fraunhofer-Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) has successfully implemented a pilot project for the streaming of 8K video over IP, in cooperation with Japanese public broadcaster NHK.

Fraunhofer-1 Fößel Siegfried-0986-Glasow

Foessel: challenge included checking the synchronisation and the behaviour of the system under real-time conditions

Fraunhofer IIS developed a JPEG XS SDK in order to integrate JPEG XS in broadcast and movie production workflows to transfer high-quality images during the production and post-production process via IP in studio quality. The Fraunhofer JPEG XS SDK runs with CPU and GPU support.

According to the institute, production and broadcast studios are looking for new ways to manage video and image transmission by Ethernet to make workflows easier and cheaper. With JPEG XS, Fraunhofer set up a system consisting of a PC-based real time encoder with 4x 12G SDI input and 10G Ethernet output, and a PC based real time decoder with 10G Ethernet input and a 4x 12G SDI output synchronised to the input of the encoder. The transmission of the data was operated on a 10GbE link as a SMPTE ST 2110 stream. The synchronisation between input of the encoder and output of the decoder was realised over PTP IEEE1588 (Precision Time Protocol).

Siegfried Foessel, head of the department, Moving Picture Technologies at Fraunhofer IIS, said: “In this pilot project the challenge was not only to use JPEG XS for transferring 8K video streams, but also to check the synchronisation and the behaviour of the system under real-time conditions.”

Masayuki Miyazaki, deputy head of production, Engineering Division at Engineering Development Center, NHK, added: “We verified the quality of JPEG XS during our evaluation phase with different compression ratios. We will present all technical details about this evaluation and the excellent results in this pilot project at the virtual SMPTE ATC conference in November.”