NTSC vs PAL

NTSC PAL

It stands for ‘Nationalized

It stands for ‘Phase
Acronym Televisions Standards
Alternating Line’.
Committee’.

It is a standard broadcast
Countries
format in United States.
It is standard broadcast
format in Europe, Australia,
and parts of Asia.

It was adopted after the

This format was first used
Origin introduction of color
in the year 1941.
picture.

Electrical power It is generated at 60Hz. It is generated at 50hz.

It has a standard 525 line It has a standard 625 line

Standard line resolution
broadcast. broadcast.

The signal is transmitted at The signal is transmitted at

Signal sent
60 fields per second. 50 pulses per second.

30 images are sent out per

Images sent 25 images per second.
second.

Pixels 720×480 720×576

 It has higher image and It has low image and frame
Speed
frame sending speed. sending speed.

It has better resolution

Characteristic It has better image quality.
quality.

To convert NTSC to PAL, To convert PAL into

first rip the DVD into NTSC, an Aimer-soft
Convert into other formats
videos and then burn the Video Converter is
DVD into PAL format. required.

What Does Frame Rate Mean

A frame rate in video is the number of separate frames that are introduced to the
viewer in a particular time frame. Frame rates are often measured in frames per
second.

Interlacing
Interlacing describes how the picture is created in the system's display unit. An
interlaced display creates an image by scanning each line, and in the next scan, it
scans the line opposite the previous line. The screen refreshes information at a
relatively less cost. It provides a faster refresh rate. The only issue with that
method is that the content displayed on the screen can flicker or have noticeable
lines in it.

Digital Video Representation

The frame rate of a motion video is determined by three major factors

The frame rate should be high enough to deliver motion smoothly.

The higher the frame rate, the higher the

bandwidth required to transmit the video signal.

When the phosphors in the display devices are hit by an electron beam, they
emit light for a short time, typically for a few milliseconds. (*Refresh rate and
flickering)

Based on the above factors, two common frame rates are used in television
broadcasting around the world.

The 25 frames (50 fields) per second rate is used in television systems (PAL)
in European countries, China, and Australia.

The 30 frames (60 fields) per second rate is used in the television systems
(NTSC) of North America and Japan

Data rate (bit rate)

 This is the rate that the data must be transferred in order to ensure the
video can play smoothly without interruption.

 It is measured in kilobytes per second (K/sec or Kbps).

 It can be calculated by dividing the size of the file (in K) by the movie
length (in seconds).

 E.g. the video file size is 1.9MB  1900K

 Play 40 seconds long, Data rate = 47.5K/sec

 Consider the Internet bandwidth!

 Video compression standards

 There are 2 family of standards: ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T

 International Standardization Organization(ISO), International

Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) , MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts
Group) produced the MPEG standards:

 MPEG-1, 1992 : video standards for CDROMs and Internet video

 MPEG-2, 1994 : video standards for television and

telecommunications standards

 MPEG-4, 1999 : advanced video coding standards

 MPEG-7, 2001 : metadata for audio-video streams, Multimedia

Content Description Interface

 MPEG-21, 2002 : distribution, exchange, user access of

multimedia data and intellectual property management

Compressed video stream

 MPEG-1

 The MPEG-1 standard only specifies the syntax of the bit stream and the
semantics/operation of the decoding process and leaves out the design of the
encoder and decoder (to stimulate competition and industry product
differentiation) although it provides a reference implementation

 MPEG-1 was designed mainly for storage on reliable storage spaces, not for
transmission on noisy channels

 the standard has 5 parts/layers:

 1. systems (11172-1)

 2. video (11172-2)

 3. audio (11172-3) – includes MPEG-1 Layer III (.mp3)

 4. conformance testing (11172-4)

 5. software simulation (11172-5)

MPEG-2
 MPEG-1 allowed rates of 1.5 Mbps at SIF resolution and higher
resolution coding standards were needed for direct video broadcasting
and storage on DVB, DVD

 MPEG-1 allowed encoding only of progressive scan sources, not

interlaced scan sources

 MPEG-1 provides limited error concealment for noisy channels

 a more flexible choice of formats, resolutions and bitrates was needed

Audio Compression

What is sound
 Sound is a wave phenomenon like light but it is a macroscopic and
involves molecules of air being compressed.

 For example, a speaker vibrates back and forth and perceives a sound.

 Sound waves are longitudinal and conceives all properties of ordinary

waves such as reflection, refraction and diffraction.

 Using transducer to convert sound pressure to voltage levels.

Sampling and Digitization

 Sampling means measuring the quantity we are interested in.

 Digitization means to convert continuous sound waves into its

constituents voltage levels.

 Typical sampling rates8kHz (8000 samples per second) to 48 kHz.

 Human ear can hear from 20Hz to 20kHz.

 Human voice starts from 4kHz.

 Sampling in the amplitude or voltage dimension is called quantization.

Audio compression

 Simple Audio Compression:

 Lossy: Prediction based

 Psychoacoustic Model

 MPEG Audio

 Layer I and II

 MP3 (MPEG Layer III)

Compression Goals

 Reduced bandwidth

 Make decoded signal sound as close as possible to original signal

 Lowest Implementation Complexity

 Robust
 Scalable

MPEG Audio Compression

 Physically Lossy compression algorithm

 Perceptually lossless, transparent algorithm

 Exploits perceptual properties of human ear

 Psychoacoustic modeling

 MPEG Audio Standard ensures inter-operability, defines coded bit

stream syntax, defines decoding process and guarantees decoder’s
accuracy.

MPEG Audio Features

 No assumptions about the nature of the audio source

 Exploitation of human auditory system perceptual limitations

 Removal of perceptually irrelevant parts of audio signal

 It offers a sampling rate of 32, 44.1 and 48 kHz.

 Offers a choice of three independent layers

MPEG Audio Layer I

 Simplest coding

 Suitable for bit rates above 128 kbits/sec per channel

 Each frame contains header, an optional CRC error check word and
possibly ancillary data.

 Eg. Philips Digital Compact Cassette

MPEG Audio Layer II

 Intermediate complexity

 Bit rates around 128 kbits/sec per channel

 Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB)

 Synchronized Video and Audio on CD-ROM

Forms frames of 1152 samples per audio channel

 Data Mining

 Data Mining definition:

 A class of database applications that look for hidden patterns in a

group of data.

 Finding rules of the game knowing the moves of the game

 Unifying framework for data representation and problem solving in
order to learn and discover from large amounts of different types of
data.

 Multimedia data types: Any type of information medium that can be

represented, processed, stored and transmitted over network in digital
form Multi-lingual text, numeric, images, video, audio, graphical,
temporal, relational, and categorical data.

Cloud Computing

 Cloud computing is an emerging technology aimed at providing various

computing and storage services over the Internet.

 It generally incorporates infrastructure, platform, and software as

services (PaaS, SaaS, IaaS)

 Cloud service providers rent data-center hardware and software to

deliver storage and computing services through the Internet.

 By using cloud computing, Internet users can receive services from a

cloud as if they were employing a super computer.

 They can store their data in the cloud instead of on their own devices,
making ubiquitous data access possible.

SaaS

 Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS).

 The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s

applications running on a cloud infrastructure.

PaaS
 Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS).

 The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud

infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using
programming languages and tools supported by the provider.

IaaS

 Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

 The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing,

storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where
the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can
include operating systems and applications.

Multimedia Cloud Computing

 Cloud-based multimedia-computing paradigm, users store and process

their multimedia application data in the cloud in a distributed manner,
eliminating full installation of the media application software on the
users’ computer or device and thus alleviating the burden of multimedia
software maintenance and upgrade as well as sparing the computation
of user devices and saving the battery of mobile phones.