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NAB Show 2009 Through My Ears, Eyes and Sore Feet, Part 2

May 26, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

           

Who Cares?

Good question. If you look at the streaming market as the prototypical pyramid, with the mass market on the bottom, and large companies on the top, only those companies at the very tippy top care about the ability to dynamically switch between files, or performance through a CDN or cache server. Still, these companies are very large broadcasters who represent a disproportionately high number of video streams, as well as significant reference account opportunities.

What’s interesting is that these companies have at least two other alternatives to consider, Move Adaptive Stream from Move Networks, which is available today, and H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which H.264 codec vendor MainConcept showed off in its booth at NAB. Briefly, where the Microsoft and Adobe approaches require separate video files for each connection speed, SVC creates customized streams using a lowest-common-denominator “base” layer, incremented by additional resolution, quality, or frame rate by “enhancement” layers. This structure is more efficient because it involves only a single file that’s easier to administrate and much smaller than the combined size of the multiple files created by Adobe and Microsoft.

MainConcept Scalable Video Coding (SVC)

In the photo at right, I’m showing three video streams from the same SVC file. The smallest player is the base layer only, the next largest is base plus one enhancement layer, the largest the base plus two enhancement layers.

To make SVC work, you need an encoder, which MainConcept has; a streaming server of some kind; and playback compatibility from players such as Adobe's Flash Player or Microsoft’s Silverlight Player. At least for Adobe, which I asked, support for SVC is not on its short term roadmap, and I would assume the same for Microsoft since it's pushing Smooth Streaming as the solution for this problem.

Nonetheless, to paraphrase John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Authority” song, when a proprietary technology fights a standard in the streaming world, the standard always wins, especially when devices such as set-top boxes and cell phones are in the mix, as they are here. It may take a while, but in my humble opinion, SVC will be the ultimate solution, and MainConcept will be one of the most important codec vendors.

Other MainConcept News

On a different subject, MainConcept will also be selling versions of its codec that you can use in Apple Compressor as a QuickTime Export Component, and as a plug-in for Adobe Media Encoder (AME). Prices aren’t firm yet, but they sound like they’ll be in the $500-700 range, available sometime during the summer. This is a huge deal for Apple Final Cut Pro producers, because the Apple codec is slower to encode and of lower quality than the MainConcept codec.

Though AME already uses the MainConcept codec, because it takes so long for codec enhancements to flow through Adobe’s quality-control and product-release functions, the codec MainConcept releases this summer could be a year or so ahead of that in AME, and much more configurable. I hope to get a copy of the plug-in for testing before it’s generally available, so stay tuned.