Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 643 This VCD Is Not That VCD (Continued)
Although these practical features do not directly affect the video quality itself, they are of great significance to the viewing experience of the audience and the playback process of the radio station.

Take the subtitle function as an example. Due to the relationship between "digital" content, editing is far more convenient than "analog" content, and various languages ​​can be easily matched.

The separation of audio stream and video stream can further assist the expression of video content in dubbing.

To sum up, it is actually multi-subtitle and multi-channel support for video content that has become popular many years later in the original time and space.The reason why it failed to stand out along with VCD and was not perfected until the era of the Internet and high-definition was largely due to the fact that the design itself was not in place.

Of course it is very different now, not only the VCD has changed a lot, but also these practical features are in place in one step.

In Tang Huan's view, these functions can greatly help his Chinese-language movies, Chinese-language TV series and other entertainment content to reach a wider audience at the technical level.

Of course, it is not only the Chinese-speaking family that has benefited from this, and the English language with the strongest economic strength must definitely come out on top.This is also something that can't be helped, the general trend is like this.

Ted Turner's focus is similar to that of Tang Huan. After all, there is a project in front of him that requires extremely high program production quality.

The Friendship Games he single-handedly promoted, although it may be the first, conforms to the general situation of the world. At present, it has been confirmed that more than 70 countries and more than 3000 athletes will participate in the competition of 18 major events, and Turner Broadcasting The company expects to produce at least 130 hours of television programming itself.

Now that the stage is set and the drama is about to begin, the curtain caller must follow suit.

Although English is the mainstream in American society, the viewing status of small languages ​​such as Spanish cannot be ignored. Especially, CNN has an ambitious plan to expand its business to all over the world, so it needs friendly support for multiple languages. Tang Huan's broadcasting and television-level digital video broadcasting system DigitalVersatileObjects1——Digital Versatile Objects generation system, namely DVO-1 system, caters to such demands.

In the building where the equipment was being debugged, Ted Turner looked at the demos - "Love to the Flower" and "Phantom of the Tomb: Wrath of the Dragon Emperor", which support multi-subtitle and multi-channel, and expressed his first impression, "Your DVO-1 system is seamlessly connected with that broadcast and TV-level digital video non-linear editing system—Digital-1 system, directly covering the most important functional requirements of the TV station."

"This is a natural product function coverage." The smug Tang Huan pointed to the TV screen quite contentedly and said, "Removing language barriers to cultural communication is just an incidental function of my product. It is even more critical. What’s more, the era of standard-definition programs will be led into the digital stage by it—the crown of digital standard-definition belongs to me.”

"It's a pity that your digital standard-definition laurels can only be worn within the scope of the TV station at this stage. The TV signal is sent out and finally reaches the audience. It is still the traditional analog method, which is not so easy to change." Ted Thorough Na joked.

"I believe that many people will find huge business opportunities in it, and then take the initiative to help me promote the changes of the times." Tang Huan replied confidently.

The so-called standard definition, that is, standard-definition-Standard-Definition, refers to the definition of 720x576 pixel standards, VHS video tapes, it is equivalent to this specification.

Tang Huan's home version of the VCD is not up to this standard, because its resolution is only a quarter of the VHS tape.

不过，他的广播电视级VCD就符合这个标准了，毕竟在这个高端领域，成本因素可以往后排。DVO-1系统完全支持标清节目的输出，并且分辨率支持720x480像素的16:9宽高比、720x480像素的4:3宽高比、640x480像素的4:3纵横比等多种模式，同时画面刷新率也可以为每秒24帧、30帧或者60帧。

It's as powerful and flexible as it gets.

This also shows from another aspect how different Tang Huan's VCD is.

In general, it has added and perfected practical features such as menus, subtitles, separation of audio streams and video streams, and digital video disc region code restrictions. Specifically, the products are divided into two directions, one low and one high, for home consumption and radio and television. The video quality is similar to the VCD of the old version of the original time and space, and the latter is closer to the DVD of the original time and space.

Obviously, with the support for different video quality, there is an extremely obvious difference in data throughput between a home DVD player and a DVO-1 system.

The resolution of the home version VCD is 352x240 pixels and 352x288 pixels corresponding to the NTSC and PAL TV standards, which is about a quarter of the corresponding TV standard resolution.

Its data transfer rate is 1150kbit/s for video and 224kbit/s for audio, totaling 1374kbit/s.

This data concept can be compared more vividly with music CDs and computer CD-ROM/RW.

The data transfer rate of an ordinary music CD is about 150kB/s. This indicator is defined as 1x speed in the computer field, but at this stage CD-ROM products generally support 2x speed, and the high-end can reach 8x speed.

Calculated according to the speed transfer rate of the home version VCD, it is roughly equivalent to an ordinary music CD.In other words, a standard 74-minute CD can store about 74 minutes of video in VCD format for home use.

Taking into account the space occupied by metadata for practical features such as subtitles and menus, a movie usually requires two CDs to store.

If you want to play this kind of video program on the computer, you only need a 1x speed CD drive in theory, but considering the actual smoothness, you need at least a 2x speed CD drive; The data transmission is not timely and the playback freezes.

Obviously, if you add the hardware decoding expansion card necessary for the computer system, as well as high-specification CPU, large-capacity memory and other hardware, this will be a bit of a luxury solution, and market development is still needed to reduce the cost to the general public acceptable level.

As for the manufacturing cost of home DVD players, it is not so pessimistic. The high cost of the computer system is largely due to the strict requirements of the computer system for data accuracy. Compared with music CDs without error correction functions, computer CD- There is a "three-layer error correction" mechanism in ROM products to ensure the accuracy of the data, and at the same time increase the cost; moreover, the CPU used by the computer is a general-purpose microprocessor, which can neither achieve the highest efficiency for video applications, nor Waste of performance and cost.In contrast, home DVD players can achieve multiple goals by directly adopting a dedicated decoding chip overall solution.

The gap between household consumer-level VCD and broadcast TV-level VCD can also be vividly described by a comparison.

At present, the price of home VHS video recorders on the market is around a few hundred dollars, while the initial price of a freshly released home VCD player is several thousand dollars; as for the DVO-1 system of broadcasting and television level, the cheapest price is tens of dollars. Ten thousand U.S. dollars.

Such a huge difference is not only due to market positioning, but also because broadcast and television-level VCDs, which are close to the DVD technology in the original time and space, are expensive to build, and their speed transmission rate is several times that of the home consumer level. DVO-1 The cables used for data transmission within the system even use the latest fiber optic technology.

At the same time, the storage media and drives of broadcast and TV-level VCDs did not directly adopt the low-cost solution of off-the-shelf CDs, but redesigned a set of solutions from scratch: DigitalVersatileObjects——Digital Versatile Objects or DVO , a solution between VCD and DVD in the original time and space, it can smoothly replace the existing CD, CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, VCD in the future.

This is also a point that Philips and Sony are very afraid of. Tang Huan has proved that he has the strength to kick them out of another set. The reason why the storage medium and drive system of the household consumer-grade VCD adopts the CD solution is only because of its It has been proven that the market is willing to accept it, and it is just a matter of saving trouble!
The most obvious difference between the two storage media and drive systems is also in the data throughput.

Music CDs, computer CD-ROMs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, and household consumer-level VCDs are all based on music CD storage and drive solutions, so their basic unit of data transfer rate is based on music CDs, that is, about 150 kilobytes per second, and the data transmission rate of more than 1300 kilobits per second for household consumer-level VCDs is also to cater to this limitation.

DVO also has the concept of data transmission speed similar to CD, but its double speed has reached 600 kilobytes per second.

On a deeper level, this difference stems from the invisible and intangible multimedia compression standard MovingPictureExpertsGroup - the Moving Picture Experts Group, or MPEG.

In this set of multimedia compression standards, it is mainly divided into two fields - video and audio, and each of them is divided into four levels, namely Layer4, Layer1, Layer2 and Layer3.

Layer1 belongs to lossless compression, the main purpose is to facilitate data organization, and it has little meaning for actual multimedia playback, at least at this stage.

The VedioLayer1 of the video is similar to Huffyuv, and the AudioLayer1 of the audio is equivalent to the FLAC that appeared in the 21st century in the original time and space.

Starting from Layer2, the compression standard belongs to lossy compression.

The VedioLayer2 of the video and the AudioLayer2 of the audio frequency, the application goal is the broadcasting television class, is also the compression standard adopted by the expensive DVO-1 system.

Video's VedioLayer3 is the video compression standard used by home consumer-level VCDs, but in view of the current resource overhead required for decoding, its audio compression standard uses AudioLayer2.

As for the temporarily shelved AudioLayer3, it is basically the famous MP3 in the original time and space.

Both VedioLayer4 for video and AudioLayer4 for audio are aimed at network-based streaming media, and they can only appear in special occasions such as laboratories for the time being.

Thousands of patents have been produced around such a complete and complex set of multimedia compression standards, and these are the cornerstones of Tang Huan, who is behind the scenes, in preparing for future multimedia applications.

Of course, the current situation is as Ted Turner just analyzed. The technical influence of the DVO-1 system can only be limited to the scope of the TV station, the dissemination of TV program signals, and the program receiving terminal on the audience side. ——TVs will remain in the "analog" mode. This is due to decades of industry development. It is impossible to switch to the "digital" mode in one step, but whether its application will have to wait until is still under research. The "high-definition" stage will only enter the practical application stage after it is launched, and it will depend on Tang Huan's ability to put his creation into action.

If "standard definition" and "digital" start to marry now, the most direct benefit is that compared with analog signal modulation, the precious program transmission channel can transmit multiple digital signals at the same time more efficiently.

At the same time, although the digital standard-definition TV system has the same effect as the general NT****AL and SECAM analog TV systems, it can effectively reduce the occurrence of ghosts, snowflakes, and noise.

Again, the road map has been made very clear by Tang Huan. I believe someone will see the huge business opportunities contained in it and take the initiative to work together to promote it and seize market opportunities.

As for home video disc players, because the price remains high for the time being and the program viewing quality is roughly the same as VHS recorders, the temporary market reception is to be expected.

However, Tang Huan will see how well his Chinese-language movies and TV series are accepted around the world, and accelerate the price drop of home video players at any time, so that it can help out with its multi-subtitle and multi-dubbing functions, or even simply replace it with high-end DVO.

In short, Tang Huan's entertainment media industry is slowly approaching the IT industry, and thus an unimaginable chemical combination will occur, allowing him to continue to win the future.

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(End of this chapter)