As of Sept. 15, the Advanced Television Systems Committee approved and published A/72, which details the methodology to use Advanced Video Coding (AVC) within an ATSC DTV transmission.
AVC, which was developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group, is also known as H.264 and MPEG-4 Part 10. The A/72 Standard defines constraints with respect to AVC, compression format restraints, low delay and still picture modes and bit stream specifications. It also specifies how CEA-708 closed-captioning is carried in an AVC bit stream.
The new standard is in two parts. Part 1 is titled “Video System and Characteristics of AVC in the ATSC Digital Television System," and Part 2 is titled “AVC Video Transport Subsystem Characteristics."
According to ATSC President Mark Richer, the standard will be “especially important” in countries that haven’t yet settled on a digital television standard. AVC also is an important part of the ATSC-M/H mobile, handheld standard and ATSC-NRT for non-real time program delivery.
For more information, visit www.atsc.org.
