The first conference held by HD Processing FORUM: - "HD Trend, Driving Digital Media and PC Market, and its Issues"

The first conference held by HD Processing FORUM:
"HD Trend, Driving Digital Media and PC Market, and its Issues"

　HD Processing FORUM hosted the 1st conference, titled "HD Trend, Driving Digital Media and PC Market, and its Issues," on Wednesday, March 19, 2007 in Tokyo (Figure 1). In Japan, high-definition broadcasting and flat-panel display TVs, as well as camcorders supporting AVCHD, have been becoming popular. The market size of camcorders supporting HD video was about 230,000 in 2006 and was estimated to be 560,000 in 2007 (Canon's data). The figure accounts for about 40 percent of the whole camcorder market in Japan.

　The conference this time is the first event HD Processing FORUM hosted. It introduced the HD trend and issues in the field that include information appliance, video editing software, game development, PC, the Internet, and semiconductors. Despite the event regarding very limited field of HD processing, more than a hundred participants showed up at the venue. At the demo exhibition sections, they asked keen questions, demonstrating the degree of interest toward HD processing.

High-Definition video that gives the maximum excitement

　First, Mr. Reiji Asakura, a Tsuda College lecturer and digital media critic, gave a speech titled "Advancing HD trend in digital consumer electronics and its impact" (Figure 2). He explained the impact: "HDTV gives the maximum excitement when the three factors, image quality, reality, and content, are coupled with each other. Appearance of HDTV media is the largest epoch in the audio-visual history that ranges for the past 25 years or longer."

　In 1976, VHS appeared as the audio-visual media, and Laserdisc in 1981, both of which were of analog image. Later in 1995, DVD emerged, exemplifying the digital image era. Then, in 2006, Blu-ray Disc came in to the scene, unveiling the HDTV media era.

　"Excitement has much to do with the information volume. HD video media such as Blu-ray give six times as much excitement as DVDs do," says Mr. Asakura. "Three revolutions in image qualities, namely in content, media, and display image qualities, progress from upstream to downstream." In the revolution of content image quality, it becomes possible to interweave the producers' will and feeling into the video image, resulting the director's intention being important. As for media, AVC high profile was exemplified as improvement in image quality for Blu-ray Disc recorders. As for display image quality revolution, appearance of organic electro-luminescence (OEL) display was a case in point. Mr. Asakura emphasized that OEL display was the first expressive power for the human race in terms of the image contrast, fineness, and so forth.

Higher performance for PC and ease-of-use for video editing software important

　Mr. Ryu Matsumoto, Digital Product Marketing group at Cyber Link TransDigital, described the current situation around video editing in his speech entitled "Trends toward HD and its issues in video editing software," from the standpoint as a video editing software vendor in Japan (Figure 3). First, he pointed out the polarization of video needs in the consumer market.

　One need is that consumers want to record their families or near affairs easily and beautifully. This is the reason for most users to purchase camcorders. According to C-NEWS' research, 40 percent of people answered digital camcorders to the question: "What you bought when a baby was born." (The research was toward 300 Internet users who are twenty-year-old or older, married, and owners or will be owners of camcorders.)

　Another is, of a small number, though, the need to deliver unique content on a low budget without depending on the media. Popularization of video sharing sites, such as YouTube, is driving the rise for such needs. According to the white paper on telecommunications by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (2007 edition), the number of YouTube users in Japan is 10,170,000 exceeding 10 million, as of February 2007.

　Regarding the sales number of digital camcorders per image quality in Japan, BCN Ranking on a weekly basis reported that the sales number of camcorders with full-HD image quality surpassed that of SD image quality ones as of September 3rd in 2007. According to the C-NEWS research, users of camcorders say that they are most dissatisfied with their camcorders in that "it takes time to set up, resulting missed shooting opportunities." Mr. Matsumoto mentioned that they have to keep their camcorders recording lest they lose opportunities and that video editing becomes more necessary as the result. Given such a background, he pointed out that it is necessary to improve the performance of PCs that allows to smoothly edit HD videos and ease-of-use for video editing software, in order to spread HD video.

Pre-rendering a 13-second video image with 10 PCs for 1 month

　The third speaker was Mr. Misao Matsushita, Technical Officer, R&D Department and General Manager at CRI Middleware, developing middleware for video games and entertainment (Figure 4). The company is a software house specialized in development of audio/video middleware for Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3), Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, and so forth. Mr. Matsushita listed high-quality image as one of the requirements for video systems for games. In video games, no matter how short the opening video is, extremely high quality is required. CRI Middleware develops unique codec technology called "Sofdec" that supports bit rates ranging from 10 to 70 Mbps, in addition to standard codec such as H.264.

　In playing back HD video images on a PS3 using Sofdec, processing tasks including video, graphics, and audio are assigned to eight SPEs, one function for each SPE, on the Cell Broadband Engine processor. In the video processing, Sofdec slices each image in the direction of the scanning line and assigns a processing task to one SPE for each slice. In this way, the company makes it possible to smoothly play back high-quality image.

　"The problem lies in rendering," said Mr. Matsushita. "It takes a month with 10 PCs to perform rendering of a video image for 13 seconds." He revealed the present situation of the game video production, calling for high performance PCs.

　During his presentation, Mr. Matsushita demonstrated an opening video image of a game that the company created. The powerful, high-definition video image projected on the large screen fascinated the conference participants. In the end of his presentation, Mr. Matsushita asked, "Is the HD really needed?" Then, he concluded, arguing that you cannot get back once you experience HD although it takes a lot of time as well as cost to process HD video data.

RIA trend accelerating on the Internet

　Mr. Kenji Fujita, the chief editor of Nikkei PC, gave a presentation entitled "Rise of Net content with HD quality" and explained rapid trend to rich internet application, or RIA, which is in progress on the Internet (Figure 5). RIA is the general term for applications that have realized a high expressive power and operability using Flash, Java, Ajax, and so forth, in the user interface. Mr. Fujita took up Adobe Systems, Inc. and Microsoft Corp. and exemplified their strategies.

　In December 2007, Adobe released Flash Player 9 Update 3, the latest edition of Flash player that boasts the high penetration rate of 70 percent or more.

　The software supports video playback of H.264, a standard video codec, with HD quality up to 1080p. Moreover, Adobe has been rolling out their new strategy called "AIR," or Adobe Integrated Runtime. AIR is a new application runtime environment on a PC desktop, enabling to use Flash, PDF, HTML, and so forth, on a single environment. Adobe says that AIR allows to develop applications that can go beyond Web browsers while retaining close collaboration with the usage of the Internet, represented by Web access.

　On the other hand, Microsoft developed software called "Silverlight," a Web browser plug-in. Silverlight enables RIA with excellent operability and expressive power, in addition to video and/or animation, on Web. The supported formats include WMV (Windows Media Video), VC-1, WMA (Windows Media Audio), MP3 audio, and so on.

　Based on such a trend, Mr. Fujita stated that "content on the Internet would transition from the centralization type, which is easy to manage, to the RIA era, where applications max out the client's resources."

Release timing for SpursEngine evaluation board and roadmap unveiled

　The final speaker was Mr. Masubuchi, Director at Advanced SoC Development Center, System LSI Division, Toshiba Semiconductor Company (Figure 6). In his presentation entitled "Stream processor: SpursEngine - Efforts toward problem solving," Mr. Masubuchi described SpursEngine's features and roll out plan, including demonstration of SpursEngine-powered PC applications.

　In 2007, the number of camcorders supporting HD exceeded 500,000 in Japan. Also, the total shipment of TV sets supporting HD has been increasing more than 30 percent annually in the entire world and is estimated to be 35,000,000 in 2008. Meanwhile, on the Internet, CGC (or consumer generated contents), which is represented by YouTube, is increasing rapidly, and the video editing needs are rising. Under such circumstances, processing time for video editing with a PC, particularly increasingly longer time for encoding, has emerged as a problem. To solve such problems, Toshiba developed SpursEngine.

　SpursEngine has four computing units called SPEs (or Synergistic Processor Elements), which are integrated on Cell/B.E. processor, and hardware encoders and decoders for H.264 and MPEG-2 video image processing. SpursEngine is used as a coprocessor for the host CPU. The software architecture is based on two-layer structure consisting of the basic software API and middleware API. SPE code is sent to SpursEngine from the host system for execution.

　Mr. Masubuchi mentioned home-use PCs with more powerful audio-visual processing capability, as a target market. Specifically, he listed audio-video codec; recognition that allows to operate equipment in the living room with hand gestures ("gesture interface"); up-conversion from SD to HD ("Super Resolution"), automatic classification of video images and thumbnail creation ("Face Navigation" video indexing), and so forth. He then introduced those videos of the demonstrations exhibited at CEATEC Japan 2007.

　Lastly, Mr. Masubuchi unveiled their roadmap, including the development plan for "SpursEngine II" with more excellent performance versus power consumption, and provision of the SpursEngine evaluation board in the second quarter of 2008.