FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Digigami VBR HD MPEG-2 Encoder Keeping Pace with H.264

Long Beach, CA - December 22, 2005 · Digigami today announced its new MegaPEG HDTV VBR MPEG-2 encoder is capable of matching and, in some cases, exceeding the picture quality while at the same time offering reduced bitrates compared to current H.264 encoders.

Recently, Sony Pictures senior VP of advanced technologies, Don Ecklund, was blasted for his assertions about MPEG-2 video quality in defense of Sony's decision to release HD MPEG-2 encoded feature films on Blu-Ray discs. Digigami's own research and actual MPEG encoder output (HD MPEG-2 sample movies) verify Ecklund's claims that MPEG-2 can and will achieve quality/bitrates comparable to H.264 for the next generation of optical disc formats.

"By and large, both viewers and media companies are primarily concerned with the quality of HD-encoding of feature films. " remarked 清岡家元, CTO of Digigami. "Most modern television content is shot in 35mm 24p, and so is technically quite similar to feature films."

New Advances in MPEG-2 VBR Encoding squeeze Hi-Def MPEG-2 on standard DVD

Proponents claim H.264 it is capable of HD encoding feature films at the same bitrates as standard definition DVD. To the extent that this is true, the capability is not unique to H.264. The new Digigami HD encoder can produce 720p content with an average bitrate of 3-7 mbit/s, which is equivalent to the bitrates used in today's standard definition DVD titles. Comparing with H.264 we can see there is no advantage; an improved MPEG-2 encoder can perform this feat as well. Score one for MPEG-2.

"In our tests here at Digigami, we find that our MPEG-2 encoder is actually outperforming H.264 by a wide margin on 720p/1080p film content. Typically, our HD MPEG-2 encoder can produce VBR files two thirds to one half the bitrate produced by current H.264 encoders. On our website we have compressed material which supports this assertion. A recent example is a 400MB H.264 720p video blog that we recompressed to 172MB MPEG-1 VBR. In our testing, only highly saturated, brightly colored material (atypical of most content) is improved by H.264 - owing primarily to the use of 4:2:2 color. It amuses us that our MPEG-1 VBR encoder can also match and outperform H.264 on many progressive encoding tasks at HD frame sizes. MPEG-1 is 6 years older than MPEG-2 and even more widely adopted, reliable, proven and trustworthy."

Improves Widely Used MPEG-2 Rather Than Hopping H.264 Bandwagon

Digigami took a different approach to improving their video encoder technology. Firstly, the company built a powerful MPEG video picture quality analysis (PQA) tool which allows employees and customers to quantitatively analyze any existing compressed MPEG-2 footage. The compression results of different encoders, including H.264 encoders, can be compared quantitatively. Secondly, Digigami used these tools to analyze a large number of commercial DVD titles encoded by different encoders and mastering houses. Based on the findings, they made improvements to the company's core MPEG-2 encoder which eliminates inefficiencies of previous generation encoders - the same goal as H.264. However, these improvements require no changes to the MPEG-2 HD televisions, which is the reason for having an ISO standard in the first place.

Increased Bitrate Headroom of Blu-Ray Optical Discs Boon to MPEG-2

"The first thing you notice when analyzing compressed feature films is that MPEG-2 is already doing a great job of squeezing this material down. In most feature films, long segments of dialog provide for very efficient and easy file size reduction. It is not clear that H.264 is going to make these very low bitrate sequences any smaller. Instead, we find that the difficulty with standard definition DVD is the bitrate ceiling of 9.8 mbit/s, which is the primary constraint when trying to compress challenging material. With the vastly increased bitrate headroom of 54 mbits/s afforded by Blu-Ray (compared to 25 mbits/s CBR for ATSC HDTV), our MPEG-2 encoder has no trouble encoding high-complexity/high-motion passages, and, at the same time, in easy sections it is clear that we are running circles around H.264. We have re-encoded a wide variety of HD material currently available in H.264 and in only one case were not able to reduce the bitrate by 30-40%. So there is no question that MPEG-2 at 54 mbits/s is capable of accurately representing HD feature film content with stunning quality."

"Saying that MPEG-2 is incapable of competitive VBR HD encoding is like saying that twisted pair ethernet will never go above 10 mbits/s. In 1991, if you would have advocated use of twisted-pair ethernet at speeds of 1 gigabit, people would have thought you were insane."

Pricing and Availability
The Digigami MegaPEG HDTV VBR MPEG-2 encoder is currently shipping and is available for Mac OS X, and runs on most modern Apple hardware. The price is $995.00, which includes everything you need for multi-pass interactive VBR encoding of feature film content. Digigami technical support provides assistance in achieving superior quality and file sizes with both HD and SD encoding.

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