At this point with the advanced and heavy technology that 3360 degree video requires, it almost feels as though we’re back in the modem days with limited bandwidth, where pictures took forever to load. Now, it has emerged that Fraunhofer HHI has developed a new kind of way for 360 video to be streamed and for it not to put a massive strain on servers and bandwidth.
Put in a simple way, for VR to be fully immersive there needs to be a hi-res field of view (FoV), but this often takes up a lot of data and general processing, especially when streaming 360 degree videos. As a result, a new approach to streaming is needed, and that is what Fraunhofer HHI is doing, called tile based HEVC video.
Now here is the more technical side to it. The way Fraunhofer HHI does this is through aggregation of tiles of different qualities of resolution into one bitstream. What this means is that no matter the quality of the resolution, it can be compressed and sent through a simpler stream without the need of heavy processing which puts pressure on bandwidth. Therefore, it is much more efficient and it even enables a better decoder utilisation such as 16K video quality using a 4K decoder.
Fraunhofer HHI will be showing off this new tech at IBC in Amsterdam, where exhibitions are available to look at fom 9th to 13th September, with the conference to start on the 8th, only two days from now.
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