FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Digigami Ships MPressionist HDTV 3.0: Testing and Analysis for HDV, ATSC HDTV, DVB and HD-DVD MPEG-2 Video

Widespread Adoption of MPEG-2 Increases Conformance and Interoperability Burden

"The MPEG-2 (ISO/IEC 13818) video compression standard, which is now employed in HDV (prosumer HD), ATSC HDTV, satellite DTV, DVB, DVD and HD-DVD/Blu-Ray, has reached such a high-level of market acceptance that the need for versatile and productive diagnostic tools has never been greater." said Digigami CTO, 清岡家元. "Broadcasters, device designers, engineers and quality assurance professionals are just now beginning to understand that the breadth of the MPEG-2 standard (and interpretations and implementations thereof) creates a significant testing burden with respect to the diverse range of bitstreams discovered when striving for interoperability and standards conformance.

Consumers understand it differently - they read MPEG-2 and they interpret it as a single format - nothing could be further from the truth. Digigami MPressionist HDTV is unique in it's ability to open and decode any MPEG-2 4:2:0 bitstream (MPEG-2 Program, Transport of Video Elementary Stream), and provides unrestricted access to all the headers, user data, compressed and decoded video frames in the bitstream. The big advantage is the ability to work with this diversity of bitstreams in the symbolic (syntactical), visual (compressed frames) and time (statistical) domains at the same time."

Ideal for QA and Support Engineers

"This product is ideal for Quality Assurance and support technicians and engineers" continued Kiyooka, "Problematic bitstreams can be requested from customers and analyzed using objective metrics, demystifying the underlying causes of artifacts or playback stuttering.

In our own QA and support activities, we have seen a variety of strange MPEG-2 files, including corrupted bitstreams and bitstreams with severe picture artifacts caused by improper encoding. Usually, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the cause of playback problems simply by reviewing a faulty bitstream on a playback device. Diagnosing such problems is surprisingly simple with MPressionist.

One customer provided us with a syntactically-correct 8 Mbs MPEG-2 CBR bitstream that had a randomly-placed 400 Mbs bitrate spike - needless to say, this video did not play properly - and confounded support personnel. Other tools, including the Windows-based MProbe (no longer on the market), had failed to identify the source of the problem. When viewed with MPressionist HDTV, the irregularity was immediately evident."

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