LAUSR

This paper introduces the world’s first ultrahigh-definition (UHD)-2/8K 120-Hz high-efficiency video coding (HEVC)/H.265 realtime video codec that complies with 8K broadcasting standards in Japan. The validation results of the processing performance and image quality are presented, and an 8K 120-Hz live transmission experiment using the codec is described. In realtime high-frame-rate 8K 120-Hz video encoding and decoding, both high-speed processing and high-image-quality encoding are necessary. In this study, the encoder processes an 8K 120-Hz video in parallel with 12 UHD-1/4K 60-Hz encoders (four and three partitions in the spatial and temporal directions, respectively) after analyzing the down-converted 4K input video. In the decoder, video- and audio-decoding functions were implemented using highly parallelized software. Through validation, we confirmed that the proposed codec achieved high image quality at a low bitrate of 85 Mb/s, which is equivalent to the bitrate of 8K 60-Hz broadcasting, and stable transmission at a high bitrate of up to 400 Mb/s. We also determined that the proposed codec is practical for live transmission .