TDVision Pushes ‘Full’ 3D

Startup Claims Its Technique Conserves Bandwidth

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 8/2/2010 12:01:00 AM

The first 3DTV broadcasts from cable and satellite operators don’t look quite as spectacular as they could.

That’s because, to deliver the signals over existing infrastructure, pay TV operators are shoehorning the two separate images required for 3D into the space usually taken up by one HD feed.

Now, a small company called TDVision Systems claims it has a way to deliver 3D in full high-resolution format — without needing twice the bandwidth.

The privately held firm is pitching its “2D+Delta” encoding technology, which delivers one full HD signal along with a subset of information for the second eye. That “delta” includes only the differences between the left-and-right-eye images, allowing two full-HD streams to be reconstituted on a compatible 3DTV.

Initially, cable and satellite-TV operators are delivering 3DTV in so-called frame-compatible format, which squeezes left-and- right-eye views into one screen. While that has the advantage of working with existing set-tops and transmission equipment, the approach amounts to “just mercilessly ripping out half the pixels and throwing them away,” said Ethan Schur, TDVision’s chief standards engineer and head of marketing.

According to Schur, a framecompatible 3DTV broadcast requires roughly 115% of the bandwidth for a regular 2D channel, to account for some overhead, while delivering only half the resolution of 1080i HD. Using TDVision’s 2D+Delta encoding, a “full-resolution” 3D stream would need about 145% the bandwidth of its 2D counterpart.

Moreover, the TDVision system is designed to be backward-compatible with 2D-only TVs, which would simply disregard the additional 3D information and display a single image.

The 2D+Delta system would require more processing power on set-top boxes to deliver 3D, Schur acknowledged. But he noted that the company’s codec is part of the Multiview Video Coding (MVC) amendment to the H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard recently adopted by the Blu-ray Disc Association as the Blu-ray 3D specification.

The privately held company, based in Irvine, Calif., has fewer than 10 employees, Schur said. TDVision was founded in 2003, by Manuel Gutierrez Novelo, an electrical engineer from Mexico with a background in digital computer systems and electronic-control systems.

TDVision is planning to license its technology to video-encoder makers and other equipment vendors through Italy’s Sisvel, which handles licensing for patents associated with international standards including Digital Video Broadcasting–Terrestrial (DVB-T) and Long Term Evolution (LTE). Its first partner on this front is Magnum Semiconductor, which plans to embed the 2D+Delta codec into its video-compression chip sets.

TDVision plans to demo the technology at the CableLabs Summer Conference in Keystone, Colo., Aug. 15 to 18, which is open to the consortium’s members and invited vendors.