Internet traffic to quadruple in next 4 years and more video data

Cisco's VNI Forecast Projects expects the internet will be four times as large in four years and  worldwide devices & connections to grow to almost 19 billion, nearly doubling from 2011 to 2016.

By 2016, annual global IP traffic is forecast to be 1.3 zettabytes – (a zettabyte is equal to a sextillion bytes, or a trillion gigabytes). The projected increase of global IP traffic between 2015 and 2016 alone is more than 330 exabytes, which is almost equal to the total amount of global IP traffic generated in 2011 (369 exabytes). This significant level of traffic growth and service penetration is driven by a number of factors, including:

• An increasing number of devices: The proliferation of tablets, mobile phones, and other smart devices as well as machine-to-machine (M2M) connections are driving up the demand for connectivity. By 2016, the forecast projects there will be nearly 18.9 billion network connections―almost 2.5 connections for each person on earth, ― compared with 10.3 billion in 2011
• Faster broadband speeds: The average fixed broadband speed is expected to increase nearly fourfold, from 9 megabits per second (Mbps) in 2011 to 34 Mbps in 2016.
• More video: By 2016, 1.2 million video minutes―the equivalent of 833 days (or over two years) ―would travel the Internet every second. Globally, there are expected to be 1.5 billion Internet video users by 2016, up from 792 million Internet video users in 2011. Global advanced video traffic, including three-dimensional (3-D) and high-definition TV (HDTV), is projected to increase five times between 2011 and 2016.
• Wi-Fi growth:  By 2016, over half of the world's Internet traffic is expected to come from Wi-Fi connections.
• Global mobile Internet data traffic is forecast to increase 18 times from 2011 to 2016, to 10.8 exabytes per month (or 130 exabytes annually).

See more in the Cisco press release "Cisco's VNI Forecast Projects the Internet Will Be Four Times as Large in Four Years".

It means "Big Data" analysis will play bigger roles. MIT "Big Data" Center just received  a $12.5M fund from Intel. HEVC / H.265 and HTML 5 will be highlight spots in new technology developments.

GPU Cloud Graphics and Video Compression

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told analysts few days ago just how important cloud graphics will be to the world. The company announced that its recently announced Kepler-based graphics chips are capable of cloud graphics. That means they can process graphics for multiple users in a data center and then dispatch the appropriate graphics as needed to the displays of distant remote users.

That allows big new applications for cloud computing in the enterprise. You can, for instance, use your own puny laptop to access huge visual projects such as engineering designs. Your computer will tap the graphics computing power in the cloud to render the images that your laptop could never display in real-time. One graphics processing unit (GPU) in the cloud can supply the graphics for at least four remote users today, compared to just one for prior chips. That makes cloud gaming and enterprise cloud graphics applications far more economical than in the past.

See more in http://venturebeat.com.

GPU cloud will challenge video compression technology of today.  HEVC intra transform skipping addresses graphic contents, but HEVC or H.265 may requires lots of resources to keep up with real time encoding. Vector based encoding techniques may involve to have better contributions.

HEVC / H.265 Analysis Tool - CodecVisa

CodecVisa is an analyzer for H.265/H.264/AVC/MVC, VP8, MPEG2 Video and YUV video codecs. Currently it supports HM6.3. Test it online @ http://hevcvisa.codecian.com/.

Compiling Live555 with Microsoft Visual Studio

Live555 are source-code libraries for standards-based RTP/RTCP/RTSP/SIP multimedia streaming, suitable for embedded and/or low-cost streaming applications. It can be easily built with Visual Studio 6 (VC6). The following instructions are for a command line build using VC6.

1. Modify the line "TOOLS32 = ..." in win32config to point to the VC6 installed directory in your host machine. For example, "TOOLS32 = C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98".

2. Comment out "del /Q liveMedia.mak", etc., since they do not exist yet.

3. Run genWindowsMakefiles.cmd to generate *.mak.

4. Save the following commands into a bat file in the src directory.
call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Bin\VCVARS32.bat"
cd liveMedia
nmake /B -f liveMedia.mak
cd ../groupsock
nmake /B -f groupsock.mak
cd ../UsageEnvironment
nmake /B -f UsageEnvironment.mak
cd ../BasicUsageEnvironment
nmake /B -f BasicUsageEnvironment.mak
cd ../testProgs
nmake /B -f testProgs.mak
cd ../mediaServer
nmake /B -f mediaServer.mak

5. Run the saved bat file.
6. Play .exe in \testProgs

If you like to use VS2005 or VS2008, the following links are helpful:

• Compile Live555 using VS2005 Part 1
• Live555: Compiling with VS2008

HEVC / H.265 Text Specification Draft 7 (HEVC DIS) and HM-7.0rc2

The Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) are now developing the next generation of MPEG coding, which, when completed, will be known as H.265, HEVC, "The Next Step for MPEG". This work began in early 2010, and is expected to result in the publication of a finished standard in 2013, 10 years after the publication of MPEG-4. A principal objective of H.265 is to improve coding efficiency, reducing bit rate requirements to half that required for comparable pictures in MPEG-4, at the expense of increased computational complexity. It is aimed at advanced displays and television systems that use progressive scanning and resolutions from 320x240 pixels up to UHDTV with 8K resolution (7680x4320 pixels), so it is aimed at covering the gamut from handheld mobile screens to theater-grade 8K displays, and the systems to produce and transport images for them, plus improved noise performance, dynamic range, and color fidelity.

JCT-VC of ITU-T WP3/16 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/ SC 29/ WG 11 held its ninth meeting during 27 April – 7 May 2012 at the ITU-T premises in Geneva, CH. The primary goals of the meeting were to review the work that was performed in the interim period since the eighth JCT-VC meeting in producing the 6th HEVC Test Model (HM6) software and text and editing the 6th HEVC specification Draft (which was issued as an ISO/IEC Committee Draft – CD), review the results from interim Core Experiments (CEs), review technical input documents, establish the 7th draft of the HEVC specification (to be issued as an ISO/IEC Draft International Standard – DIS) and the seventh version of the HEVC Test Model (HM7), and plan a new set of Core Experiments (CEs) for further investigation of proposed technology.

The JCT-VC produced three particularly important output documents from the meeting: the HEVC Test Model 7 (HM7), the HEVC specification draft 7 a.k.a. Draft International Standard (DIS), and a document specifying common conditions and software reference configurations for HEVC coding experiments. 


The meeting documents can be downloaded at http://phenix.int-evry.fr.


The latest HEVC or H.265 text specification draft 7 can be downloaded from the link. The Draft 7 of High efficiency video coding addressed:


• RQT related issues (#459)
• Log2MaxTrafoSize constraint (#348)
• log2TrafoWidth1 and log2TrafoHeight1 calculation for NSQT (#458)
• non_square_quadtree_enabled_flag (#403)
• Wrong 'else if...' for 'if (skip_flag)' in CU syntax (#452)
• use_delta_flag[ j ] is not decoded when used_by_curr_pic_flag[ j ] is 1 (#451)
• combined_inter_pred_ref_idx does not exist anymore (#448)
• Typos in reference picture list combination (#446)
• Text cleanup of QP prediction / derivation (#492)
• Equation (7-59) and (7-60) for RPS derivation do not match HM6.0 (#445)
• Chroma NSRQT fixes (#505,#506)
• Missing decoding process for AMP fixed (#361)
• Incorporated CBF coding without derivation process (JCTVC-I0152)
• Incorporated Unified CBFU and CBFV Coding in RQT (JCTVC-I0332)


The latest HEVC reference software version is HM-7.0rc2. 


At CES 2012  in Las Vegas LG Electronics showed the "world's largest" 3D Ultra Definition (UD) HDTV. The 3D UD TV measures an incredible 84-inches and features a 3840 x 2160 resolution (4K). HEVC or H.265 is coming at the right time.