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Does Adding HDR Justify Multi-Codec Delivery?

Learn more about multi-codec delivery at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete panel, T105. Get Ready for a Multiple-Codec World, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Nathan Egge: I think there is some added cost there, you know, the best example of a place where we had to look at this was with the WebRTC standardization effort, where it took I think three-and-a-half years to come to... We were presenting codec options and we talked about audio. It was very obvious, like we presented Opus and I think, G611, or whatever? So those two were like the two mandatory and then audio codecs, when it came to video it took three-and-a-half years and we didn't actually end up with a single mandatory-implement video codec we ended up with two VP8 and 264 and that created a bunch of compatibility issues, right? I mean, you had broader reach because like maybe you could get to different access points that you couldn't get to before, but now you have these boxes in the middle to do with compatibility and so you know there's some trade-offs that were made there and I think that it's a successful standard and that people are using it. And so you have to kind of deal with some of the extra costs to reach that broader audience.

Tim Siglin: To a certain extent it almost sounds like the discussions we had around HTML5 video and audio tags where the assumption was the video tag was going to be of a single codec and ultimately you had to make callouts.

Nathan Egge: Yeah, that was another unfortunate set of discussions that didn't get to a place where we insured compatibility.

Tim Siglin: So do you also see what Tarek and Vittorio were talking about with HDR, I mean, is that a reason to implement or is bandwidth savings a more primary reason?

Nathan Egge: I agree with them that reaching or enabling new use cases that you didn't have before is very compelling and I think that as Victoria said, this notion of, you know, say... HDR as you know, a 25% improvement or a 25% increase in total information content, is a more compelling offering than going to 4K. The user experience is going to be much higher. And so moving to a codec that allows you to do that is going to enable that use case. Dealing with multiple codecs to do that is totally rational and compelling.

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