Digigami ships MegaPEG HDTV v3.0 MPEG-2 encoder
updated 09:05 am EDT, Wed September 28, 2005
Digigami MegaPEG HDTV v3.0
Digigami today announced it is now shipping for Mac OS X, its flagship MPEG-2 encoder for compressing High-Definition video into standards-compliant MPEG-2 (ISO/IEC 13818) bitstreams. The product creates streams compatible with ATSC (North American), ISDB-T (Japan) and European (EBU) standards for HD, and can perform on-the-fly format conversion, including SD upconversion and HD downconversion and conversion from ATSC to EBU and vice-versa. "The product, in it's third major revision since 1996, is unique in the world of HD encoding tools by integrating compression with built-in picture quality analysis tools (PQA) which provides the encoding operator with unparalleled feedback, diagnostics and control over the encoding procedure." It is available for $800 (introductory pricing for full version).
"Now you can compress to all major HD applications with an easy-to-use Macintosh compression tool." said Digigami CTO, Gen Kiyooka. "The high-quality MPEG-1 HD encoding delivers HD as streaming video over standard internet connections. The built-in HD MPEG-2 encoder compresses HD for all proposed HD-DVD standards and all HD Digital Broadcast systems which employ MPEG-2 video and MPEG-2 systems."
MegaPEG HDTV includes an integrated PQA tool with the same features as Digigami MPressionist Pro HD. Any HD encoding job can be paused and the intermediate compression results analyzed to ensure that the stream meets quality expectations. According to the company, the built-in analysis tools is useful in environments where MPEG-2 bitstreams must adhere to specific bitrate or profile constraints imposed by MPEG-2 ad-insertion and hardware playback systems.
The single-pass MPEG encoder features a floating point video pre-processing pipeline which supports both constant (CBR) and variable bitrate (VBR) operation. Users can select Tradeoffs between compression time and picture quality (encoding accuracy) via an easy-to-understand interface that offers a simple eleven position slider to configure the encoder. For advanced users, all aspects of the encoding are available for configuration, including the specification of MPEG-2 features features as Intra-DC precision, custom GOP patterns and custom DCT quantization matrices.
"Not only can MegaPEG HDTV create compressed MPEG video for all major MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 applications, it also provides the analysis tools for demystifying the wide variety of compression parameters which come into play across HDTV, HD-DVD, DVD and MPEG-1 encoding."
