NAB sent me some spam today saying that the ATSC group has adopted AVC (H.264) as a format for future DTV broadcasts. Currently, ATSC DTV transmissions use the MPEG-2 format.

The primary target is those markets that don’t currently have any DTV transmission technology in place yet. Implementing AVC in the US domestic market would be a bit of a challenge, give the number of MPEG-2 decoding tuners already in place, or on their way to market. Essentially, we’d need another round of “we’re going to break all your TVs on this date” in order for AVC support to happen at this point, and it’s probably not worth the trouble.

Focus Enhancements, manufacturers of the Firestore line of products, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy today. It was pretty clear that it was coming – they haven’t had a profitable quarter for quite a while, the stock has been delisted from the NASDAQ and the market for harddisk recorders is eroding.

Too bad for their employees, but hopefully someone will buy them cheap (their market capitalization was under $5million yesterday) and refocus (excuse the pun) the company around a core set of products. Many folks don’t realize that besides the Firestores, Focus makes video switchers, digital asset management tools, conversion software, digital signage tools and semiconductors. Maybe it’s time to just do one of those things well…

On2 has announced VP8, the latest in their line of video codecs. Most folks are familiar with VP6, which was the standard Flash Video format prior to the adoption of H.264.

On2 is claiming that they can achieve H.264 performance at half the bitrate. I don’t doubt that there are instances in which that’s true, though with any codec comparison, there’s lots of room to fudge the issue. Keep in mind that H.264 was initially approved in 2003, so it doesn’t surprise me that On2 has been able to make improvements, though similarly in that time there have been many improvements to the H.264 standard which have not yet made it into mainstream software.

I think the time of proprietary, single source codecs like VP8, VP6, or Real (or even Sorenson) have passed. VP6 was a great stopgap which allowed Flash to deliver decent quality video in the browser, but it was always a pain to work with, with limited encoding options and non-standard tools. On2 is advertising VP8 as an alternative to the mucky patent world of the MPEG licensing association, but that process isn’t nearly as difficult to traverse as they imply, and I doubt the costs to get a license for H.264 are significantly different than the costs to license VP8.

The great benefit of ISO standards like VC-1 and H.264 is that anyone can go get a reference encoder or reference decoder, with the full source code, and hack on their own product. When it times come to ship, they just send the MPEG-LA a dollar (or whatever) for each copy and everyone is happy.

Ok, that’s enough rambling.

ProVideoCoalition has coverage of a few JVC announcements from IBC. JVC will be launching an add-on for its HD200 and HD250 cameras which adds a single SXS slot recording in some sort of XDCam format. They’ve also launched a JVC branded version of the Firestore FS-5.

It’s pretty exciting to think about the possibility of other manufacturers adopting the SXS format. It’d be nice to see prices come down further on the cards, and more flexibility to move between devices.

By the way, anyone got a Focus Enhancements deathwatch yet? The stock’s down to 7 cents a share… if I had $6 million, I could buy the whole company!

This happened a few days ago (at IBC) but I forgot to blog it – Telestream has officially announced the Pipeline HD, the newest member of their Pipeline family of products. Pipelines take video in and spit it out ethernet, in a variety of formats. The Pipeline HD was “pre-announced” at NAB, but now it’s officially headed our way.

The SD pipelines output DV and MPEG-2. With the HD model, they’ve gone a bit higher end, supporting DVCProHD, ProRes 422 and DNxHD.

I’ve had some experience with the SD pipeline and have always been impressed. The selling point is that it lets you use your existing IP infrastructure to move video around, instead of building out a video fabric. However, having these ‘pro’ formats in the new one means they’ll really be opening themselves to a wider market.

ProVideoCoalition has the blurb announcing that Telestream has acquired Vara Software, makers of ScreenFlow and Wirecast.

I’m not sure what to make of that – Telestream has shown good taste in who they acquire, having previously purchased Popwire, makers of the Episode line of products. However, Vara was a rising star in the mac software community, consistently delivering highly polished, fun to use, reliable applications that pushed the boundary of what was thought possible. One hopes they continue to retain some independence after the acquisition, and can keep churning out the products that have won them so much acclaim.

Anyways, congrats guys, hope you made some serious cash.

Apparently not content letting DNxHD eat the whole cross-platform near-uncompressed HD-interchange pie (what a delicious pie), Apple has released standalone copies of the ProRes codecs for both Mac and Windows. These are available as a free download, which will allow any Quicktime-supporting application to playback prores files.

This is a major step towards what would be the ideal solution – a codec pack, which many of us would happily pay for, which would provide codec parity between mac and windows, without having to purchase Final Cut Studio.

This is one of those “only interesting to me” stories, but Digital Content Producer has the press release announcing a 20 slot frame from Ross Video at IBC. In our newer studio at the University, we ended up spilling into a second frame to hold Ross cards, so it’s nice to see that in the future we can up the density, rather than sacrificing precious rack space.

I mentioned it earlier, but ClipWrap is officially on sale. There’s a free trial which will convert the first minute of any number of m2ts, and $50 gets you the full application.

Check the features list for the full rundown. It’ll finally make my Firestores useful again!

I’m stealing this post from FreshDV, which offered links to an article at Camcorder Info about the cameras in use at the Beijing Games, as well as an article in the Wall Street Journal about the “DiveCam” rig. I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.