Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has come up with a new approach to MPEG-2. The new technique recompresses the MPEG-2 enabling almost the same level of quality video to be saved in half the original volume. In satellite broadcasting, the company says, the MPEG-2 stream is transmitted at an encoding speed of 18Mbps or 24Mpbs. Mitsubishi’s further compression enables MPEG-2 data streaming at a speed of 9.8Mbps. The company demonstrated their MPEG-2 technology with an LSI decoder playing back 1080i image data encoded using the new technology. The end result is a 2 hour HDTV movie can be stored on a 9.4 Gbyte DVD disc.
The new technology was introduced in an article published on AsiaBizTech. Mitsubishi says the technology can be applied to DVD video recorders, HDD video recorders etc. The company says the technology can also be applied to products such as authoring tools. The company is currently preaching about the optimization of encoding parameters including motion-compensation (MC), discrete cosine transform (DCT) and quantization. The company is developing MPEG-2 encoder LSIs with the new encoding technology and the company expects to manufacture them in 2004. That’s the date Mitsubishi is pinning on the calendar for recordable DVD technologies to take off.
Mitsubishi has also pioneered D-VHS, video tape capable of storing HD video where DVD does not yet have the capacity. The studios are interested in D-VHS because it has better copy protection than the CSS currently used on DVDs. D-VHS recorders are just now coming to market.