Trans-Atlantic 8K/UHDTV Streaming With UltraGrid and Commodity PCs

An anonymous reader writes "During the 12th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop in Chicago, researchers have demonstrated interactive multi-point streaming of 8K/UHDTV (i.e., 16x Full HD resolution) using commodity PC hardware running Linux and open-source UltraGrid software. The transmissions featured GPU-accelerated JPEG and DXT compressions implemented using the NVIDIA CUDA platform, which are also available as open-source software. The streams were distributed from the source to one location in the USA and to another location in the Czech Republic over 10Gbps GLIF network infrastructure."

Acronym overload

[JK_the_Slacker]

BINGO!

Re:

[wonkey_monkey]

BINGO!

You could at least tell us what that one stands for.

Re:

[viperidaenz]

It's his name-o

Re:

[wonkey_monkey]

Could you spell that for me? Three times ought to do .

Re:

[viperidaenz]

B - I - N - G - O
B - I - N - G - O
B - I - N - G - O
And Bingo was his Name-O!



ps: I'm not yelling slashdot.

So?

[rmstar]

Uhuh. So... what?

16 times Full HD sounds like 16 channels on TV.

Perhaps the submitter should have spent a word or two explaining why this was interesting/important/whatever.

Re:

[wonkey_monkey]

Well, as a back-of-the-envelope calculation, they kinda do.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

No, they kind of don't. Or at least they shouldn't, and if they do, something is broken. Higher resolution allows you to capture higher spatial frequencies in the image, but if there aren't any (a part of the picture is a white wall, for example), the extra information to encode and compress simply isn't there. Of course, there are always going to be visually hideously complex scenes with tiny details, like a dense jungle or a gravel path, but the current typical applications for this take place in artifici

Re:

[wonkey_monkey]

but if there aren't any (a part of the picture is a white wall, for example), the extra information to encode and compress simply isn't there

But for all those blank areas that don't require many more bits, won't there be plenty of other parts of the image which now do require more bits because there's more detail in them compared to a smaller version of the same scene?

To put it another way, how is encoding one of these 8K HD videos that much different to encoding 16 separate HD videos, each being a crop of the whole?

Re:

[L1mewater]

To put it another way, how is encoding one of these 8K HD videos that much different to encoding 16 separate HD videos, each being a crop of the whole?

It's not significantly different, except that there is a slight savings on overhead. G.P. is being kind of weird, and assuming that the higher resolution display would mean that a higher proportion of the 8K image would be stationary, or something.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

No, I simply mean that artificial scenes are often kind of dull (not in any subjective sense). And the fact that portions of scene are either stationary or at least amenable to motion compensation is already widely exploited, that is, of course, an assumption in all modern codecs.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not know about satellite TV, but cable tv compresses the source so bad, that 720p TV looks blocky on a 1080p TV with little movement. Cable TV providers, like comcast are ruining HD TV by the crappy quality because they only care about money, not about quality. If they ever got on this bandwagon, they would fuck it up.

Re:

[citizenr]

I do not know about satellite TV, but cable tv compresses the source so bad, that 720p TV looks blocky on a 1080p TV with little movement. Cable TV providers, like comcast are ruining HD TV by the crappy quality because they only care about money, not about quality. If they ever got on this bandwagon, they would fuck it up.

This is because US is retarded and uses MPEG-2 while rest of the world swims in sweet h.264.

Re:

[Gr8Apes]

I know that satellite uses H.264, or was, a while ago. AT&T Uverse and FIOS both use MP4 I'm pretty sure. Cable - no idea - their picture quality sucked so badly I dropped them years ago and every time I see them again, even on small screens, I cringe at the artifacts. I'd have to check my OTA feeds, but I do recall at least a few being MPEG2 last time around, and one was broadcasting in 720p while another multiplexed 5 channels and compressed their main HD channel severely as a result, giving distinct

Re:

[LaminatorX]

Blame the market. When choosing among two or three TV providers, consumers tend to favor quantity of HD channels over quality of picture.This may be because you don't get to see the picture before you subscribe, or it may be that most people wouldn't know quality if it bit them. Just the same, the market rewards carriers who cram lots of 10-15Mb/s streams down their pipes, so they do.

Re:So?

[Gr8Apes]

Yeah, a click on TFA indicates this was streaming 8K video, which is roughly 16 times the resolution of 1080 (whether that's 1080i or 1080P is ambiguous).

The real story is that there's now a significantly large 10G internet connection. A side note - they're streaming 16X HD content, which is generally about 8GB for 2 hours compressed, or 4GB per hour, which is about (consults anachronistic pocket calculator) 9 Mbps for the HD stream or roughly 144Mbps for 16X that assuming the same compression efficiency and/or loss acceptance.

Not sure why 10G was needed, other than as a POC for the technology. 1Gbps should have been plenty.

Re:

[54mc]

This is exactly what I was confused about. If something can run on commodity PCs but requires a 10Gbps connection, it's not something that's going to be ready for prime time for quite a while.

Re:

[Gr8Apes]

10G isn't all that expensive, but it's not commodity by any means at this time. The prices are in the range of 100Mbps ethernet gear in the earlier part of the 90s, but honestly, other than geeks, I don't see most people needing it any time within the next 5 years. Note that's just about when 10G should hit upper end commodity prices, and be usable by the upper end of the masses if it maps to past trends.

Re:So?

[TheSync]

Note that this experiment was specifically not on commodity Internet, but on the Global Lambda Integrated Facility [www.glif.is].

10 Gbps is usually delivered on OC-192 / STM-64 / 10G SONET.

8K UHDTV (4320p) has been defined by SMPTE as a resolution of 7680x4320 (33.2 megapixels).

JPEG 2000 for 2K Digital Cinema Packages are 250 Mbps, a rate determined to be adequate by the industry. This group used 2 Gbps for 8K, which is reasonable considering it is ~16 times the resolution of 2K.

Re:

[fustakrakich]

How come resolution isn't still measured by vertical resolution? 4320P is 4K to me. And 8K should be HD x 64

Re:

[TheSync]

how come resolution isn't still measured by vertical resolution?

Because back in the analog day, broadcast engineers cared about vertical lines of resolution. The horizontal resolution was just a factor of bandwidth.

Re:

[Gr8Apes]

There's at least 2K, 4K, 8K and 10K cameras out there - all higher resolution than what we know as HD. Very useful if you need to crop film and retain HD capabilities, for example.

Re:

[PPH]

Uhuh. So... what?

16 times Full HD sounds like 16 channels on TV.

Maybe if the broadcasters get enough extra channels, they'll re-run 'My Mother the Car' on one of them. I can't wait!

.CFG

[sycodon]

I bet the config file (Which one? I don't know) is about 100 pages long.

MJPEG?

[afidel]

Ewww, MJPEG looks like crap compared to just about any other video format at the same bandwidth. It's computationally easy, but it's certainly not what you'd hope for in a production standard.

Re:

[citizenr]

why? hardware h.264 decoder barely scratches the surface of my GPUs performance. Im pretty sure you could run 16 instances at the same time one modern GPU.
MJPEG is evil.

Re:

[L1mewater]

Decoding is much, much easier than encoding.

Re:

[citizenr]

Decoding is much, much easier than encoding.

so? Moore's law. Currently h.264 encoder chips cost $10. You could build 16x full HD h.264 encoders array for ~$160 today. Probably cheaper than one Nvidia card they used for mjpeg. Hell, a cluster(fuck) of 16 Raspberry pi's (broadcom can encode fullhd effortlessly) would be cheaper than what they used. All this is Today.

Re:

[L1mewater]

Caveat: I wasn't part of this project, and don't entirely know what their purpose was or what exactly they meant to communicate by saying that participants at the receiving location could "control the stream interactively." I'm guessing it just means start, stop, pause, fast forward, and rewind or something. You can't just say, "Oh, I can buy an h.264 encoder chip for $10." I mean, you can say it, but it doesn't tell us anything. There are tons of different h.264 encoders of varying qualities, targeted

Re:

[viperidaenz]

How much processing do you need to do to stitch 16 h.264 streams in to one? Before you say "You don't, you decode them separately on the other end" That would make the title "Trans-Atlantic 1080p Streaming with UltraGrid and Commodity PCs, done 16 times"

Re:

[TheSync]

I suspect this was JPEG 2000, not just "MJPEG". CESNET has previously done 4K [cesnet.cz] IP streaming with JPEG 2000.

JPEG 2000 is the standard for digital cinema, and has the advantage of having limited loss in multi-generations of decode/recode.

Many TV networks use JPEG 2000 at 100-150 Mbps for IP transmission contribution to the network centers from major sports stadiums.

Cisco has a device to do up to 12 channels of HD video over IP [cisco.com] as uncompressed (1.5 Gbps) or JPEG 2000.

Spelling mistakes, links broken

[jupiterssj4]

sofware? Also that link has an extra . on the end, break it

GLIF=Global Lambda Integrated Facility (I think?)

[NinjaTekNeeks]

Didn't know what GLIF was so I looked it up : http://www.glif.is/ [www.glif.is]

And here is a map of the infrastructure: http://www.glif.is/publications/maps/GLIF_5-11_World_4k.jpg [www.glif.is] (6Mb)

Re:

[frosty_tsm]

I read that one as GILF. That isn't something I'd wish to see in ultra HD.

Four years ago the G meant Governor.

doesn't matter.

[Nyder]

I do not know about satellite TV, but cable tv compresses the source so bad, that 720p TV looks blocky on a 1080p TV with little movement. Cable TV providers, like comcast are ruining HD TV by the crappy quality because they only care about money, not about quality. If they ever got on this bandwagon, they would fuck it up.

 

Its the same in the UK

[Viol8]

Our Freeview digital broadcast service has "HD" channels, but they're only HD so long as nothing moves, whereupon the picture dissolves into nasty motion blur and thats using H264. Still, the SD channels are even worse - the mpeg2 blocking effects makes some of the more compressed ones unwatchable.

Re:

[viperidaenz]

Yes. I love interlaced 50hz 576 line PAL resolution. Its just as good as that interlaced 60hz 480 line NTSC.

My 720p DVB-T signals I get now have nothing on them.

Great this is absolutely wonderful!

[fredrated]

Now we just need content worth watching...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn industry has that part "handled."

10Gbps

[girlintraining]

... Well, we know it wasn't Comcast.

How about playback performance?

[hackertourist]

Streaming, for me, generally equals lousy playback. Stuttering, taking lots of time to resynchronize when you skip back or (worse) forward. Usability is sacrificed in an effort by the broadcaster to retain control.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Piratebay until they get their act together

i'll check back later

[hurfy]

Bookmarked for when i get 10Gbps internet service...

Display

[Anonymous Coward]

So there is currently no 8k display available, unless it's in a lab somewhere. Heck, a 70mm IMAX film print is estimated to only be the equivalent of a little above 6k. Combined with no display now or even in the very near future being able to show this, and no readily commercially available camera able to capture at this resolution, my question is why they're doing this and yet sticking with 30 frames a second when humans are readily shown to be able to differences until somewhere above a hundred frames a

yawn

[strack]

yawn. i want my 2160p 36 inch 120hz monitor already.

Dang!

[PPH]

Y'all let me know when I kin stop smackin' the TV whenever the vertical hold gets wonky.