ATSC Publishes New Standard For Advanced Video Coding

Advanced Television Systems Committee Approves New Standard

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Advanced Television Systems Committee, Inc. has approved and published A/72 which details the methodology to utilize 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. In addition it specifies how CEA-708 closed captions are to be carried in an AVC bitstream. 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 “AVC Video Transport Subsystem Characteristics.”

“AVC compression provides increased efficiency and flexibility”, said ATSC President Mark Richer. “The new standard will be especially important for those countries which have not yet implemented digital television. AVC will also be used with standards in development such as ATSC-M/H for mobile and handheld applications and ATSC-NRT for non-real-time delivery of programming.”