Posted on June 29, 2011 at 15:30 by Kevin Chung in Technology
Last week, I kicked off a series of five blogposts about a new concept/method to preserve the visual quality of video. The series consists of the following topics: Interlacing versus Progressive, Format war, Telecine, NTSC versus PAL and Television manufacturers. The central motto: “simplicity is brilliance”. Last weeks post was about interlacing vs progressive, this week it’s time for part 2: the format war.
The format war is a classic. I can relate to why consumers really have a hard time understanding formats. There simply are too much in the sense that the average consumer does not see the difference anymore. Videos have to be coded anyway for archiving or whatever purpose, either lossless or lossy. The video format defines how the bitstream should be coded and the codec itself: encoder and decoder.
Now there are two distinctive areas for video formats. Some are destined only for use within the professional market, e.g. formats for production and mastering. The other area is for consumers.
The point is that not all platforms are capable of supporting all the video formats. Therefore a conversion to another supported video format is required. This process is not always perfect, but if the right precautions are taken, it should not be a big issue. However a lot of video formats used in the production and mastering stage are proprietary: you can only decode formats using their software. The only goal seems to be protecting intellectual property, making it a political issue. If more such companies do the same, then this is really not good at all with regards to file exchange.
Wrappers
Then you have formats that are like a “wrapper” for another format, e.g. MPEG IMX 50. In essence the video stream is basically a MPEG2 Main Level stream at 4:2:2 colorspace. If you extract the elementary streams you would find out the added overhead from this wrapping is up to 10% of the total file size. Is this really necessary? This rather feels like rebranding while it actually isn’t that “new”.
In order to improve the exchange of videos and reduce the need for multiple re-encodes (especially for lossy formats), we need to reduce the tremendous amounts of video formats. Stop trying to keep everything to your own. Video is an integral part of us all and should not be taken away from us by abusing video formats. From a business and intellectual property perspective there are surely more healthy models to earn money!
Again, simplicity is key here. The professional market should reduce the total number of video format to one or two. Given that a lot of Apple-based gear is used in video production and mastering, I really do hope Apple is ready to do something good instead of trying to be so exclusive. A small example from the audio industry: the MP4 container can easily hold AAC audio elementary stream as defined by ISO/IEC. But still Apple had to create M4A plus AAC. Is that really necessary? Not from a technical point of view, it seems.
When we look at the consumer market, let’s stick to MPEG2 and H.264/AVC. Even if MPEG2 should have died long time ago in my opinion, we can probably better stick to it until H.265/HEVC comes out.
OneCodec
My pledge is that all parties involved should start working together to define universal video formats which everyone can improve and contribute to. It should reduce the amount of video formats to a minimum, much like the very knowledgeable author of many books Ian Richardson is trying to achieve with his OneCodec initiative. He recognized the very same problem and created his own solution. Check out: http://onecodec.com/
Let’s see how simple we can make things if we all work together. Because simplicity is brilliance!
