Digital TV labs HEVC solutions for 4K OTT and DVB
September 5, 2014
Digital TV Labs, the digital media testing company that specialises in testing tools and services for validating digital media and device conformance, is launching a range of products designed to aid in the development and deployment of next generation 4K / UHDTV services utilising the latest HEVC compression standard.
The ISO/IEC and MPEG developed standard is seen as the most important enabler for both UHDTV linear broadcast, OTT and hybrid services. To cater for the traditional broadcast device market, Digital TV Labs has released its “HEVC for DVB” Test Suite, which enables SoC, STB and TV manufacturers to be conformant to the recently finalised DVB specifications for UHDTV Phase 1 (UHD-1), and can also aid to meet Digital Europe’s UHDTV logo requirements.
The “HEVC for DVB” product contains streams compliant to the DVB standards at both the Transport Stream (TS) and HEVC elementary stream layers, providing comprehensive coverage for DVB-specific requirements and exercises a range of parameters including resolution, frame rate, bit depth (8-bit/10-bit) and colourimetry (ITU BT.709/BT.2020). Additionally an interoperability test suite is also included, containing contributions from some of the industry’s leading distribution encoder manufacturers.
Targeting conformance of any client or video player to the DASH Industry Forum’s DASH-HEVC/265 Interoperability Points in an OTT environment, the first platforms to launch 4K/UHDTV services, Digital TV Labs have released the latest version of their Ligada iSuite for DASH. Built on the widely adopted Ligada iSuite Test Harness, the DASH-HEVC Test Suite contains audio and video codec support for live and on demand MPEG DASH profiles, containing over 100 ISO BMFF files. Test coverage includes segmented video streaming, such as the insertion of advertisements, multiple MPD support and bitrate adaption test cases.
Keith Potter, Digital TV Labs, said, “With the introduction of any new technology interoperability is the key to wide adoption. Digital TV Labs’ new HEVC and 4K/UHDTV test tools provide a unique capability to ensure device compliance to these new standards.”