FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Digigami Ships MPressionist HD 2.0 for Macintosh

San Diego, CA - November 22, 2004 · Digigami today announced it is shipping Digigami MPressionist HD 2.0 for Macintosh. MPressionist HD is the evolution of Digigami's innovative MPEG-2 bitstream and picture quality analysis/diagnostic tool, which initially began shipping in May 2004 as an innovative and unique solution for DVD authors and professional compressionists.

Digigami MPressionist HD now gives broadcast engineers working with MPEG-2 SD/HD video a complete tool for dissecting and examining MPEG-2 bitstreams. The tool provides complete demultiplex facilities for MPEG-2 Program and Transport streams, and supports any number of elementary streams muxed in both Program and Transport bitstreams. This feature allows broadcast engineers to take bitstreams directly from the broadcast mux, and demultiplex them into the constituent elementary bitstreams.

The tool is primarily designed for analyzing the performance and behavior of MPEG-2 encoders, including both software and hardware based encoders. Takes any MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video elementary stream, in any valid SD or HDTV profile and level, and displays it on-screen in its visual form with any combination of graphical displays and overlays.

Once on-screen, analysis includes the ability to overlay bitstream level characteristics such as stream bitrate, stream stuffing bitrate, and average compression (quantization). As the bitstream is scanned and analyzed, true random access is possible, allowing fine positioning to any GOP by sequential GOP number or by time-code by way of a slider. This allows the engineer to identify portions of the bitstream where either bitrate or compression is peaking, and seek directly to that point for a closer inspection and detailed analysis. Thus, unusual or exceptional compression or bitrate peaks can be examined in the context of the entire program.

Once a picture or series of interesting pictures has been identified, every conceivable picture-layer variable or element is available for viewing and inspection. This includes how much quantization is applied to each 16x16 pixel macroblock, macroblock type, coded block pattern, skipped blocks, field and frame motion vectors and individual 8x8 luma and chroma blocks and their coefficients. The broadcast engineer can even view DCT coefficients in their numerical values, or visually as an 8x8 matrix of DCT basis functions. Throughout MPressionist HD, access to MPEG-2 data carries this twofold treatment: both numeric and visual 'views' of each data type are generally available.

As well, the tool allows examining the GOP 'group_of_pictures' frame pattern, and allows stepping forward and backward through frames in the GOP to see how motion vectors and compression are evolving over the GOP. Check the GOP pattern, check motion vector size/range, and examine any header in the bitstream, including sequence, gop and picture headers, as well as the standard MPEG-2 extension headers and user_data.

The tool records which bitstream 'layer' any user_data blocks are occurring in, be it at the sequence, GOP or picture layer, and presents the data accordingly on the display. If the user_data is in a known ATSC or DVB format, the bytes are presented in interpreted format, and otherwise as a hexadecimal display. All significant bitstream events are also recorded as bitstream byte offsets, allowing this tool to be used with any other diagnostic tool which provides for seeking to byte offsets within an MPEG video bitstream.

The tool also provides for picture decoding simulating a variety of decoding scenarios, including varying the IDCT algorithm used by the decoder, the mathematical precision of Y'CrCb to RGB colorspace conversion, and the colorspace matrix coefficients used to display the video.

MPressionist HD also provides a bitstream overview of the global pattern of field dominance, including progressive, top_first, bottom_first and 2:3 pulldown patterns. Check to ensure that hardware encoders are correctly performing 2:3 pulldown removal (replacing 2:3 pulldown with MPEG-2 pulldown flags), or simply double check that the bitstream has the field dominance that you expect, with no breaks or changes. Useful for finding where 2:3 pulldown removal is losing sync with source material.

Works with all ATSC an DVB DTV video formats, including 1920x1080i, 1280x720p, 704x480i, 720x480p, 720x576i etc. Also works with all other typical MPEG video formats, including DVD Full-D1, Half-D1, Super-VideoCD and WhiteBook VideoCD.

The tool has been extensively optimized for the Macintosh supercomputer (G4/G5) platform, making full use of the Velocity Engine(tm) (aka Altivec or VMX). The Velocity Engine is used to perform inverse motion compensation, inverse DCT (for the two most important categories of algorithms), Y'CrCb to RGB color space conversion, and frame resampling (resizing for arbitrary pixel aspect ratios and display sizes).

Numerous screen captures of Digigami MPressionist HD in action are available from the Digigami web site, with useful annotations and commentary about particular features.

For HDTV in 1920x1080i, a Macintosh G5 and large Apple Cinema display is recommended for analyzing picture_level overlays. For 1280x720p and 704x480/720x480 frame sizes, a 20" Cinema display will suffice. However, the tool can be used in the field on a PowerBook with a minimum of 17" display with any encoded picture size.

Pricing and Availability
Digigami MPressionist HD is available now at the special introductory price of $599.40 directly from the Digigami online store on the web at www.digigami.com. Site licenses, educational and volume discounts are available.

Digigami is a privately held company headquartered in the Anza Borrego desert east of San Diego, California. Digigami was founded in 1994 and released its flagship MPEG-1/MPEG-2 encoder, MegaPEG in 1996. For the past 10 years, Digigami has been continuously improving its encoder products and MPressionist HD is a by-product of that innovation and improvement.

For details and pricing information on all Digigami products, please visit our Web site at http://www.digigami.com/.

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