Makuhari Messe / Hall 4. Booth No. 4502
Visit us at the InterBEE, Japan's largest comprehensive media and entertainment event, from Nov. 16-18, 2022 to learn more about MPEG-H Audio, VVC Video, xHE-AAC, LC3/LC3plus and JPEG XS.
The MPEG-H Audio System enables immersive and interactive sound that. The personalization feature lets users choose from presets or create own settings. It also provides enhanced accessibility features such as dialogue enhancement and audio description.
MPEG-H Audio has been on air 24/7 in South Korea since 2017. In addition to that, is has recently been selected as the only mandatory audio codec of Brazil’s next generation TV system, TV 3.0. This has encouraged broadcasters in Brazil to start using MPEG-H Audio already today over their existing ISDB-T broadcast system and consequently more and more consumer devices with MPEG-H support are available on the market.
Combining MPEG-H Audio with the most advanced video codec, VVC, content providers are ready for the next generation in broadcasting. Live Encoding solutions with VVC and MPEG-H Audio are available from NEC, Spin-Digital, MainConcept and ATEME. First playback solutions with VVC and MPEG-H Audio Baseline Profile Level 4 are already available e.g. the MediaTek platform that enables TV manufacturers to support MPEG-H Audio Baseline Profile Level 4 in their devices. NAT enables Japanese broadcasters to produce their content in 22.2 together with objects, compliant to the Baseline Profile Level 4 and Spin-Digital has released jointly with NHK Technologies a complete SW solution for 8K real-time encoder, decoder and player with MPEG-H 3D Audio Baseline Profile Level 4 support.
The system is also used for music streaming, as Sony's immersive 360 Reality Audio format is based on MPEG-H Audio. The immersive music tracks, available from providers such as Amazon Music, nugs.net, Sony Select, WoWow, and TIDAL, can be played on mobile devices (with headphones), soundbars, smart speakers, and in the car.
As an ideal companion for MPEG-H Audio, Fraunhofer offers Cingo, a state-of-the-art binauralizer. Cingo brings truly immersive sound on headphones no matter if you want to use it in everyday life when enjoying media on your mobile device or for monitoring on headphones during MPEG-H Audio production and authoring. Cingo is part of the newly released MPEG-H Authoring Suite 5.0, the complete audio tool chain for MPEG-H production, available free of charge from Fraunhofer.
Fraunhofer will demonstrate a complete workflow using MPEG-H Audio Baseline Profile Level 4.
Say goodbye to interrupted or buffering audio and video streams: the latest addition to the AAC codec family offers maximum coding efficiency, with a stereo bitrate range from 12 kbit/s to 500 kbit/s and higher. Combined with seamless bitrate adjustment using DASH and HLS, as well as mandatory MPEG-D DRC volume and dynamic range adjustment, xHE-AAC is the ideal solution for adaptive audio and video streaming services - whether movies, music, audiobooks or podcasts - as well as digital radio. xHE-AAC decoding is natively supported in Android OS 9 and higher, Fire OS 7, iOS 13, and Windows 11. Fraunhofer also offers a web-based testing service that developers and manufacturers can use to check their implementations of the xHE-AAC® audio codec for compliance with MPEG standards. The free service can be used to test both encoders and decoders. It is exclusively available at https://test.xhe-aac.com/ and can be used after registration at Fraunhofer IIS.
At the Fraunhofer Inter BEE booth, visitors can experience the benefits of xHE-AAC in video and internet radio streaming applications.
The new LC3/LC3plus audio codec was developed to address the drawbacks of today's wireless communication platforms. The low complexity of the codec meets the requirements of wireless communication platforms such as Bluetooth, DECT, and VoIP terminals. By reducing the required bit rate by about 50 per cent compared to older codecs, LC3 and LC3plus enable energy-saving services that allow for longer battery life or the development of smaller products. Thanks to the flexible codec design, applications are not limited to voice services, but can also be extended to high-quality music streaming. Even High-Resolution Audio streaming over the A2DP profile is supported by LC3's sibling LC3plus. At the same time, the codec operates with low coding delay, low computational complexity and small memory requirements. Learn more about LC3/LC3plus at our booth.
JPEG XS stands for extra speed and extra small. The new ISO mezzanine codec standard co-developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits enables interoperability and allows an easy and cost-effective integration into IP-based infrastructure.
As an ultra-low-latency lightweight image coding system, JPEG XS offers visually lossless quality with compression ratios of around 10:1. It also supports resolution up to 8K and features a frame rate from 24 to 120fps.
Work on the standard continues. Recent proposals for extensions improve the PSNR (Power Signal Noise Ratio) up to 10 dB for mixed signal and screen content. These tools will be added in the 3rd edition of the standard.
Whether Virtual Reality, gaming, in-house or broadcast and digital cinema workflows, the JPEG XS mezzanine codec can be applied where today uncompressed video is used.
At Inter BEE 2022 we demonstrate the interoperability of our JPEG XS software decoder implementation with a hardware based encoder made by Astrodesign
Fraunhofer IIS offers SDKs for en- and decoding of JPEG XS on x86 and ARM CPUs as well as on NVidia GPUs. These SDKs as well as JPEG XS plugins for postproduction tools are available for licensing.
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS