As part of its plans to enable live transmission of high frame rate (HFR) video, resulting in smoother and sharper video quality, Japanese telco NTT has developed a real-time 4K high frame rate HEVC codec.





Especially effective for fast-moving video content such as sports, the main drivers of Ultra HD services, HFR enhances video smoothness and sharpness by doubling the frame rate of the standard video frame rate (SFR), from 50/60p to 100/120p. NTT says that by developing the codec, it will contribute to enhancing the quality of broadcasts and public viewing of sporting events. Also, NTT says that it will also develop opportunities to use HFR transmission in virtual reality applications. NTT first began its work in the area in March 2015 when it announced a real-time 4K/60p HEVC video encoder LSI (NARA) in order to contribute to the rapid acceptance of Ultra HD services. Both the 4K HFR HEVC encoder appliance and the 4K HFR HEVC decoder appliance, key components of the real-time 4K HFR HEVC codec, are 1U size.The 4K HFR HEVC encoder appliance also provides backward compatibility by supporting temporal-scalable encoding meaning the output stream can be decoded by conventional SFR decoder to yield 4K SFR video. It also supports the MPEG Media Transport (MMT) protocol which enables hierarchical transmission. Two independent transmission routes can be used to transfer the base-layer data, which is used for decoding of 4K SFR video, and the enhancement-layer data, which is used together with base-layer data for decoding 4K HFR video. In future, NTT is planning to proceed with trial experiments of 4K HFR services including video contribution and distribution services for broadcasters and public viewing service. It has also committed to contribute to the creation of various high-definition and immersive video services by providing