We have recently completed testing of the latest release of our software. This release of IPQ Technology completes our packet loss correction support for all reasonably standard implementations of the H.264 video protocol (as well as a couple of decidedly funky implementations. You can write me if you want to know more about the funky. stuff)
We have been focused on H.264 not only because its ubiquity in the videoconferencing world (and incorporation into the MPEG4 standard) but also because “H.264 uses the latest innovations in video compression technology to provide incredible video quality from the smallest amount of video data.” I took this quote from one of the Quicktime pages on the Apple website and while I don’t deny that H.264 is a good stuff and better than what we had to use in the past, I guess you really have to have your own definition for the phrase “incredible video quality” and that definition has to exclude the pesky reality of packet loss.
In my experience, it doesn’t matter how much or how little video data you’re transmitting: packet loss will hammer the video quality. And in my experience, the more powerful the compression technology, the more devastating the effects of packet loss. This stands to reason when you consider that the compression algorithms remove so much of the data in the first place—lose any more data to packet loss and your video quality will suck.
Watch this little demonstration to see what I mean.
The system I tested for the demo included a state-of-the-art Tandberg T1 true HD room videoconferencing system as well as a slightly older 720p Tandberg 7000 system. The network connection was in-building and the whole thing was running H.264. You can see what a mere 0.7% packet loss rate does to the quality of H.264 encoded video. It is awful and not acceptable for business visual communications purposes.
This brings me to the recent and admittedly exciting product announcements from Samsung in partnership with RADVISION. The two companies have worked together to bring a cool standalone executive-class videoconferencing end-point to market. It is an HD monitor (and what else from Samsung, right?) with integrated HD camera and integrated videoconferencing processing unit. I like the looks of this one and I think it is going to be big.
My downside comments have to do with the fact that no compression scheme is ever going to help you beat the in-your-face reality of packet loss on shared and best efforts networks (nor the packet loss on private and managed networks, but that is another topic for another post.) You see, RADVISION is positioning their H.264-based Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technology as a kind of fix for packet loss, as much as 20% packet loss! In most cases, a videoconference call gets dropped at 3%! Anything greater than that and you’ll probably have to get on a plane after all, if it’s faces you want to see.
To be fair, RADVISION has a nice term for it. They call it very high network error resiliency and that may be true but SVC certainly does not address packet loss in a direct way—not in the way IPQ Technology addresses packet loss. I admit my bias, of course, but I have yet to come across any other technology that really fixes packet loss. And I have yet to come across a video standard or protocol or compression scheme that can’t be super-charged by adding IPQ Technology to the network.
I haven’t had a chance to test RADVISION’s SVC with our IPQ Technology, but I am looking forward to it and I will be reporting on the results when I get that chance.
