40 TVBEurope
www.tvbeurope.com November 2014
Transcoding Forum
Delivering
a coded message Transcoding is a vital part of today’s broadcast and production chain. Philip Stevens moderates this month’s Forum which tackles some of the issues facing this complex technology
Different video and audio workflow environments mean that there is always a need for file transfers to take place. So what are the challenges for transcoding equipment makers? Does the use of second screens add complications? And has the ‘cloud’ made an impact on the transcoding scene? To discuss these and related issues, we’ve brought together (in alphabetical order) Bruce Devlin, chief media scientist, Dalet; Brick Eksten, VP product development, Imagine Communications; Simone Sassoli, VP marketing and business development at RGB Networks; Paul Turner, VP enterprise product management at Telestream; Owen Walker, head of product management, root6 Technology; Keith Wymbs, chief marketing officer for Elemental.
What are the biggest challenges facing makers of transcoding equipment and services? Devlin: As we start to deploy transcoding into the cloud the biggest challenge remains interoperability between systems. Gone are the days when a transcode was just a case of flipping a codec from .mp2 to .mp4. The current transcode paradigm is much more like manufacturing on demand, with a different feature set between contribution transcoding,
“The current transcode paradigm is much more like manufacturing on demand, with a different feature set between contribution transcoding, and transcoding for web” Bruce Devlin, Dalet
and transcoding for web. Smart transcoding involves great deinterlacing, frame rate conversion, audio handling, captions and
and their resolutions. The challenge is that chip
subtitles and metadata handling with a minimum
set manufacturers are reticent to leap into the
of fuss for the end user – something Dalet
game. On the software side, we’ve crossed
AmberFin has been pushing for the last six years.
the line. We know that software can do most of
This complexity results in a legacy of years of files
what we would describe as being part of the
being made in the wild that contain subtle and
broadcast infrastructure in realtime. As you
expensive-to-correct issues in them. These issues
move to software, there are discussions about
can lie there until an upgrade of playout servers,
how you are going to manage or monitor the
transcode farm and/or editing equipment takes
systems and I think that is something the industry
place when the errors need to be addressed.
is a little bit behind in.
Eksten: The biggest single influence as we think
Turner: Whilst our business is to take files from
about transcoding and encoding and all the
one format and turn them into another, the
ramifications are the next generation formats
proliferation of those formats is a constant