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Beyond The Cell -- Journalists' Video Phone
dimitri_k writes: "This article from poynter.org gives some information about the video phone that has become standard in reporting recently. It uses H.263 for compression, and a satellite phone to call into ISDN lines. Maybe people on Slashdot can brainstorm ways to increase the bandwidth of these things in the short term (i.e. cost-ineffective combination of lines) so that the cable news networks can turn the grainy, live, night-vision shots in Afghanistan clear." This setup looks a little chunky, but when you consider the capability to beam video information from anywhere in the world, it's very impressive.
This made the lack of resolution less apparent. Scaling the image up to fill the screen produces a very pixelated image. Also it seemed that the low framerate was less noticable this way. It wasn't nearly as annoying as the video phone footage that I've seen in the past.
Perhaps if they don't want to transmit in real-time and can afford a minute or two of delay they could record some footage at a higher resolution and/or framerate and then send it to the network and have them assemble it at the network. It might take 3 minutes to transmit 1 minute of footage this way. You lose the realtime aspect of the current setup but you could get better quality.
Lasers Controlled Games!
The night vision they are using is probably where the grainy-ness first comes in. It's not to say that the News Corps. arround the world cannot afford some highend night vision equipment, it's that the US and NATO will not allow anything above a certain level to be exported to non-NATO approved country, such as Afganistan. They want to keep the nice equipment out of the terrorist hands. Ever look for Night vision online? A lot of dealers will say "cannot be exported outside the US" for this exact reason. They are selling everything from Gen 1 to what some are calling Gen 3+, but only Gen 1 and maybe some Gen 2 can cross the boarder.
I have an old Ukranian Gen 1 scope that looks similar to the footage you see on TV, but when I use my newer Gen 3 scope from ITT, it's like daylight. Hell, I've even used it to read stuff in the dark, and navagate boats with it. Gen 1 scope... uggg.... New boat anchor. Gen 3 scope... I'm hunt'n wabits... on the other side of the lake... at 3 AM... with no moon light.
I aplaud the idea of enhansing the video, but realise, when the daytime footage come through, it's fine, night vision feed from an exportable scope, looks like crap.
you may try to point out the military's footage looks just as bad, but you think they are going to let the enemy know they can spot an untied shoelace at a mile and a half?
Who wants Pork Chops?
First off, I watched one of the news reports via videophone and I was quite impressed by the audio clarity and the video quality. M$'s NetMeeting can't even compare at the same data rate.v ideo-streaming.html
MPEG4 is an outgrowth of H.263.
The reason H.263 is chosen over MPEG4 and other similar streaming codecs is because the latency from video capture to transmission of the encoded image is better under H.263. During some informal testing, latency of H.263 video conferencing on a LAN was well under 2 seconds. The best I could do with Real's RealProducer using their G2 codec was around 4-5 seconds. The best I could do with Microsoft's Media Encoder with the MPEG4 codec was around 7-10 seconds.
Because of the way that MPEG2 and MPEG4 take advantage of the time domain to achieve higher compression also makes them unsuitable for 'live' 2-way video.
Here are some links to chew on:
http://myhome.hananet.net/~soonjp/vclinux.html
http://archive.dstc.edu.au/RDU/staff/jane-hunter/
http://mpeg.telecomitalialab.com/
The H.263 spec is available at http://www.itu.org for a fee.