Boffins promise 'disruption free' YouTube videos

Posted on 8 Sep 2008 at 16:43

German scientists have developed an extension to the popular video coding format used by YouTube and QuickTime, which they claim will dramatically improve picture quality.

The Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI), in Berlin are aiming to produce "disruption free" video by standardising coding techniques such as the H.264/AVC format, which is used by the YouTube video portal and Apple's QuickTime player.

According to the researchers, the loss of data packets during transmission poses the most serious problems for developers of video coding techniques as, once the data packets are lost, it is very difficult to correct errors. In a bid to rectify this problem, the HHI team has extended the H.264/AVC coding format to provide protection for the most important data packets to ensure they arrive safely at the receiver.

"Our extension of the H.264/AVC coding format protects the most important parts of the data packets so that they can be broadcast without error," said Dr. Thomas Wiegand, head of department at the HHI and a professor at the Berlin Institute of Technology.

"If, say, two video packets need to be transmitted, we equip an additional data packet with the result of the sum of the bytes in the two video data packets. If any of these three data packets gets lost, we can deduce the content of the original two," he explained.

The extension of the H.264/AVC format is called SVC (scalable video coding). It runs on all H.264/AVC-compatible devices, so customers don't need to buy new ones.

Author: Robert Jaques

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