The Arab States Broadcasting Union, ASBU, organized a series of tests at their headquarters in Tunis in October 2011, to help them plan the next phase of evolution of their inter-member IP distribution network, MENOS (their IP equivalent of the EBU’s Eurovision network).
The ASBU Profiles
ASBU have made a working assumption about the quality levels they will need in the new HDVT environment.
• The first is for talking heads/news material, which will run as a 720p/50 4:2:0 link at 10Mbit/s.
• The second is for medium critical content (TV programmes which are not premium content) that will run as
720p/50 4:2:0 or 4:2:2 at 15Mbit/s.
• The third is 720p/50 4:2:2 for premium content like major sports events running at 20Mbit/s.
The Manufacturers tested
The objective of the tests was to examine the AVC codec products of eight manufacturers; Atec, Ateme, Cisco, International Datacasting, Ericson, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Thomson. The results will help them decide which to buy for MENOS.
They examined a series of elements: interoperability between manufacturer’s equipments, video artefacts, compression artefacts, overall quality, audio artefacts, lip sync, and latency (pass time through the codec).
No monkey business at the ASBU codec evaluations ⇒
The results
How well did the equipments perform? Look out for announcements from the ASBU in the near future.