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I work for Dolby Laboratories, and am deeply involved with high-dynamic-range content creation and hardware.

We created the SMPTE 2084 standard HDR EOTF (electro-optical transfer function.) It turns out that human perception is such that by choosing the luminance for code values to be just barely indistinguishable from the adjacent ones, you can get 0 to 10,000 nits (10x as bright as this Panasonic display) with only 12 bits. SMPTE 2084 is what all HDR TVs are using today.

The relevant standards bodies have no interest in something like VP8.

SMPTE is an individual membership organization. I'm sure if an individual brought VP8 before SMPTE for standardization it would happen. SMPTE has a mixture of broadcast vendors and broadcast users of all kinds. There are some folks in SMPTE who are from companies with compression IP, but there are also plenty of other vendors represented in SMPTE that don't.

Of course, it would take time (like when SMPTE Standardized Windows Media Video as VC-1), but the result will be a well-defined specification that achieves interoperability.

Feel free to join SMPTE, show up at committee meetings, and do some standardization!

And, of course, there is a industry-wide, agreed upon standard for the 3D encoding and formats, right? Right??

It is a work in progress. SMPTE has already defined the requirements, and is working on actual specifications. Sony likes to be proprietary when they can, but I doubt they would ignore a SMPTE standard. They aren't the only manufacturer that's been talking up 3D in 2010.

Heck the new 3d that is popping up all over the place is pretty frickin cool, and you won't be seeing that in a home theater for a while yet.

About a year, according to Lucky Goldstar:

http://www.smpte.org/news/pr/view?item_key=460b9f2707af05257ba9de20cd6d1e8f9a7aceee

The baseline hardware requirement is probably going to be a system that can accept a 120Hz signal (so 60Hz for each eye) - most current systems on the market can accept a 60Hz signal and internally double it to 120Hz (or greater) so the remaining step is to move to a full bandwidth implementations of HDMI 1.3 (1.4 already being a finished standard as of about a month ago).

And the specs to see what needs to be complied to? Oh wait...

here it is. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-335.htm

Unless you meant the spec for XAML, which you could find at http://robrelyea.com/silverlight/xvSpec

Or perhaps the SMPTE spec for VC-1 ala http://www.smpte.org/news/pr/view?item_key=a135f13b173a982bb71f1cd3ee4403671fcf2057

Viewing distance calculator.

SMPTE is currently working on standardizing a version of Windows Media 9 video codec as the "VC-1 codec" under SMPTE 421M. This should provide an openly available standard to create VC-1 decoding software (if you pay your license fee to MPEGLA and potentially others).

As VC-1 is being touted as being as mass-market broadcast video codec, I imagine we will see it popping up in all kinds of ways (satellite and cable set-top boxes, and home theater sofwtare).

Microsoft got the Windows Media 9 codec published as SMPTE standard 421M. You'll likely need a patent license, as with MPEG-4 and most other codecs, but aside from that on alternative implementation is possible.

The problem is the SP/DIF interfacxe which DOES have real issues if the transmitter and receiver was poorly designed. Namely the bitstream has an encoded clock stream that the receiver should only use to sync the incoming bits. Unfortunately some device use this clock to drive the local A/D converters which is a bad idea since even if the recovered clock has the correct frequency in the long term, the short term period can change due to jitter.
The jitter is very small and its mostly due to an uneven number of zeros or ones being transmitted(an encoding scheme like 8B/10B solves this but requires what was large lookup tables in the late 80's). I don't remember it offhand but two studies have been done (with double blind testing) that sub 100ps jitter can be detected by humans. One of them is referenced in an STMPE recommended practice: http://www.smpte.org/smpte_store/standards/index.c fm?stdtype=rp&scope=0 .

MS will be using XML to replace proprietary file formats in MS Office. So the Norwegian's will still be able to use Office.

It still all goes back to patents. MPEG and SMPTE need to release MPEG4 (AVC) and SMTPE (VC-1) to the world, but that will never happen. And no Open-Source product will be able to compete effectively in these markets in the near future. The reason I say this is that it has been 10 years since MPEG-2, and we are finally seeing a MPEG-4 (http://www.mpegla.com/avc/) and VC-1 (http://smpte.org/smpte_store/standards/). These will be used for future High Def. Video and Broadcast. MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 are on the way, but that's another story, and still patent encumbered.

I didn't RTFA but, if I remember correctly, the OP has some major misinformation in his post. It was my impression that WMV9 was approved by the HD DVD groups to be supported in ADDITION to the MPEG4 codec. It didn't REPLACE the MPEG4 codec.

Provisional approval of MPEG2, WM9 (VC-9) and MPEG4 AVC(H.264) Video CODECs as mandatory for the HD DVD Video specification for playback devices, subject to (a) an update in 60 days regarding licensing terms and conditions, (b) a presentation by each of the respective licensing bodies at the next SC meeting and (c) possible elimination of any of the above CODECs at the next SC meeting.

As a non-Windows OS user, compatibility is extremely important for me. I'm sick of media contents that don't play but ask me to "update your browser/media player/codecs." Someone may think "proprietary technology" that locks in consumers is synonym to "business opportunity." Apparently BBC has a different opinion and doesn't want to swallow the pill.

Barnacles. Thus far the front-running exchange methods include such "proprietary" components as XML, RSA, Rijndael and MXF. Get a SMPTE membership for USD $120 and come to the meetings. You will soon learn that IP-laden proposals don't last long.

the DMCA will be used to prevent people from making free projectors

Hee hee. Good one. No, simple economics will do that.

-ac

Come to think of it, you just did.

As for evidence, I was using the most mainstream one I can think of. Do you have any examples to refute it, such as a film with stunning visuals and sub-par sound?

-T

However, I'm an audio professional, and will happily and uniformly disparage all of these 'tools' for neglecting to have any real ability to edit audio. As just about anyone in the industry will tell you, audio is the bastard stepchild of video/film, with less than a tenth of any movie's budget spent on sound... and yet all of those same people will agree that sound is just as important as visuals, if not more - consider the Blair Witch Project, with cheap, shoddy visuals, but eerie and compelling audio to create the mood... Now imagine a rock-steady camera in a high-budget film, with sound that sounds like cheap vinyl... or even AM radio... It's just not acceptable, and nothing will alienate your audience sooner.

As an example of the downplay of audio, Digital Video Magazine has an ad in the last issue offering a turnkey video editing system... Dual 1 GHz G4, Final Cut Pro2, 80 GB Firewire drive, Superdrive, Firewire Media Converter, Sony's $5000 prosumer digital camera, 23-inch Apple LCD cinema screen, Sony 19" NTSC reference monitor (>$1000!), and... Harmon Kardon SoundSticks!

$20,000 USD for this system, and you're getting a $150 pair of speakers... which, frankly, suck (I just wrote an article to be published in December about those speakers, after running them through tests of frequency response, distortion, noise level, etc., and you'd do better with a $150 pair of headphones... but they aren't as pretty).

Additionally, none of these programs have the ability to scrub audio, a MUST as any real audio editor will tell you, very few of them will let you edit on a resolution smaller than a frame (30 fps means that 1 frame = 33 ms... However, a 5 ms delay is audible as phasing, and as low as a 25 ms delay can be audible as a distinct echo), most of them have linear VU meters (rather than logarhythmic, like our hearing... consider, with 0 dB FS as the top of the scale, -3 dB FS is half the power, and on a linear meter, half the distance down... However, -3 dB is a difference in level that is really only noticed by trained ears... Additionally, the SMPTE standard for digital audio is to have normal level (0 VU) at -18 dB FS... Or almost off the scale on any program with linear meters... That's freakin' insane. As a comparison, try using Photoshop with the brightness on your monitor turned down to almost 0. You're trying to work reasonably at the threshhold of noise of the system you're working on.

Also, the EQs in most of these programs have their frequency range set linearly, too... Human hearing goes from roughly 20 Hz to 20 kHz (roughly - young women and children can frequently hear higher frequencies, usually topping out by 23-26 kHz), but our interpretation of frequency is logarythmic: the top octave goes from 10 kHz to 20 kHz (or, the top HALF of a linear scale). The next octave (or, the next lowest quarter on a linear scale) is from 5 kHz to 10 kHz...
You don't start getting into useful ranges until you're in the bottom 32nd of the scale, from 500 Hz to 1 kHz - the fundamental of the human voice goes from about 125 Hz to about 500 Hz, most of the vowels and formants are from about 500 Hz to about 1.5 kHz, and the consonants are from about 1.5 kHz up to about 4 kHz (for the sibilants). There's very little energy in the human voice above 5 kHz... So have fun setting your EQs properly when you're looking at a linear scale that emphasizes the top two octaves... ABOVE what you're dealing with.

Then again, the two major audio editing software programs on the market, ProTools and CoolEditPro also miss some of these, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much. When you deal with sub-standard tools everywhere, you have to give up some expectations

By comparison, look at the Orban Audicy (used in most radio stations for production), and the Fairlight Merlin and D.R.E.A.M. Stations, used for most film/television production.

Sorry. :)

-T

The Ogg reply says that the only two standards bodies they know about are IETF and W3C. Well, what about IEEE? What about SMPTE? Those are technical bodies that deal with these kinds of standards all the time.

VHS playback always uses only two heads. Four head VCR's generally use their extra heads for still frame/slow motion effects, six+ head VCR's have specialized heads that are used for different purposes (e.g. different heads for recording than for playback, or for EP(SLP)/SP modes.) Perhaps you are thinking of SVHS.

IIRC, VHS has approx. 240 lines horiz. but it's been awhile I could be wrong. VHS color fidelity is horrible, nothing compared to Laserdisc or DVD. VHS quality is much inferior to broadcast NTSC. I think most people don't realize how good broadcast NTSC can look, they never see it, most people have cable with is usually worse than VHS. Oh well...

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