Witbe Workbench now fully supports 4K technologies
December 1, 2015
Witbe, a Quality of Experience (QoE) Test and Monitoring expert, has announced the upgrade of its Witbe Workbench, with the full support of 4K Technology. Now 4K-ready, the main features of the Witbe Workbench—the Remote Eye Controller (REC), the Script Writer, and the Witbe Scheduler—bring the Witbe Technologies’ empowerments to the new 4K standards. This innovation has been mainly focused on the Witbe REC and its unique ability (with 4K content) to display and take control of up to 200 devices-on-demand simultaneously, in real time.
Designed to report on the End-User’s Experience with the highest precision (location, origin, timing, type of errors, etc.), the Witbe Monitoring architecture has been completely updated to provide any Broadcaster with an end-to-end 4K-ready Technology. The Script Writer, part of the Witbe Workbench, that enables anyone to easily define captures—visual proofs of the user interface— and write scripts now supports 4K captures on 4K devices, for true 4K scenarios. The Witbe Scheduler, another feature of the Witbe Workbench, has been improved as well. It now gives any Quality Assurance and Operations teams the ability to deploy and manage complex scenarios and cross-resolutions campaigns, and thus the unique power to monitor and validate the complete range of resolutions of any device.
The Witbe REC has also been deeply boosted to support 4K devices. First of all, it displays up to 200 device screens simultaneously on a single screen, now including 4K devices. Then, a new “High Resolution Streaming” profile has been integrated to improve visual integrity checks, made through the Witbe REC. This means that Quality Assurance and Operations teams now have the power to check the quality of their 4K and HD streams without downscale. All deteriorations can now be exhaustively confirmed and fixed with targeted tests, before the End-Users ever reach the Customer Service.
“Integrating 4K technologies revealed itself to be a major User-Experience challenge for our R&D team. In order not to saturate the operator backbone during monitoring, Ultra-High Definition content forced us to develop new streaming capabilities for the Witbe REC. The high definition of a 4K image also implies more efficient image recognition algorithms for our Script Writer. Another challenge was to improve our visual quality measurement algorithm (Witbe Video MOS), to compute the level of details and sharpness of a 4K image. We’ve had to develop a huge evolution on analytical quality evaluation, because the human eye does not interpret a block or blur the same way, on HD or 4K streams. I’m very proud of our team and the results. Keeping the same psycho-visual pertinence, from SD, HD to UHD was a critical technological challenge.”, said Jean-Michel Planche, VP Technology & Innovation and co-founder of Witbe..