Digital preservation strategies for AV content

The mass digitisation of analogue archive holdings plus the transition to tapeless production for new content means AV archives inevitably face the prospect of file-based archiving solutions using IT storage technology. But what is the long-term Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of these systems, which file formats should be used, what storage technologies make sense, what are the risks involved, what is the additional cost of managing these risks, and what new software approaches can be applied? These are all issues being explored by major broadcasters, national archives and technology specialists in the European PrestoPrime project and the UK AVATAR-m project

Towards practical distributed video coding

Multimedia is increasingly becoming a utility rather than mere entertainment. The range of video applications has increased, some of which are becoming indispensable in modem lifestyle. Video surveillance is one area that has attracted significant amount of focus and also benefited from considerable research effort for development. However, it is noted that there is still a notable technological gap between an ideal video surveillance platform and the available solutions, mainly in the form of the encoder and decoder complexity balance and the associated design costs. In this thesis, we tocus on an emerging technology, Distributed Video Coding (DVC), which is ideally suited for the video surveillance scenario, and fits many other potential applications too.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

A Dataset of User Generated Videos from Edinburgh Festival 2016

Files include footage from performances of the trEd Dance group (edfest8, edfest9 and edfest10) and Rebecca Wilson’s ‘The Strawberry Show’ (edfest6 and edfest7) taken during Edinburgh Festival 2016 by BBC R&D as part of the COGNITUS project funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 687605. BBC©2016. Further details about the content are available in the accompanying paper "An Open Access Dataset of User Generated Videos from Edinburgh Festival 2016". If you have any queries please contact BBC R&D at [email protected]. This notice must remain attached to any copy of the content

Digital Preservation Strategies: the cost of risk of loss

The mass digitization of analogue archive holdings and the transition to tapeless production for new content mean that audiovisual (AV) archives now face the prospect of file-based archiving solutions using information technology (IT) storage methods. However, many important factors in this process remain unknown. What is the long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) of these systems, which file formats should be used, what storage technologies make sense, what are the risks involved, what is the additional cost of managing these risks, and what new software approaches can be applied? These issues are being explored by major broadcasters, national archives, and technology specialists in the PrestoPrime and AVATAR-m projects

THE OPEN-SOURCE TURING CODEC: TOWARDS FAST, FLEXIBLE AND PARALLEL HEVC ENCODING

The Turing codec is an open-source software codec compliant with the HEVC standard and specifically designed for speed, flexibility, parallelisation and high coding efficiency. The Turing codec was designed starting from a completely novel backbone to comply with the Main and Main10 profiles of HEVC, and has many desirable features for practical codecs such as very low memory consumption, advanced parallelisation schemes and fast encoding algorithms. This paper presents a technical description of the Turing codec as well as a comparison of its performance with other similar encoders. The codec is capable of cutting the encoding complexity by an average 87% with respect to the HEVC reference implementation for an average coding penalty of 11% higher rates in compression efficiency at the same peak-signal-noise-ratio level