Qilu Evening News Qilu one-point reporter Cai Yudan
Photo caption: Jinan Yaoqiang Airport Winter Olympics 8K live broadcast Image courtesy of: Inspur Ultra HD
If you can't see the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics, how can you watch the opening ceremony immersively?
On February 4th, on the big screen of Jinan Yaoqiang Airport, Jinan Railway Station and Jinan West High-speed Railway Station, with the 8K ultra-high-definition decoder independently developed by Inspur Group, many passengers who went out saw the live broadcast of the Winter Olympics with ultra-high-definition picture quality, the picture was beautiful, the clarity could be accurate to every hair, and the viewing experience was even far more than the on-site viewing. Prior to this, the 2022 Spring Festival Gala also achieved high-quality 8K synchronous live broadcasting, how are these achieved?
Photo caption: Yantai Wanxing Square outdoor large screen
Behind the 8K live broadcast is the inspur group ultra-high-definition team spent 10 months of hard work, breaking through the bottleneck of 8K ultra-high-definition live broadcast technology, and cooperating with CCTV to provide ultra-high-definition video service systems and 8K ultra-high-definition decoders and 8K LED large screens for the live broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games and the live broadcast of the event. During the Winter Olympics, this technology and system provides 8K ultra-high-definition picture quality live broadcast of the event to 34 key cities and more than 120 key areas across the country, including winter Olympic venues, transportation hubs, outdoor public places and important sports venues, so that the audience can "visit" the Winter Olympic site anytime and anywhere to cheer for Olympic athletes; it also means that the technology of Inspur is officially applied on a large scale for the first time in the world.
On the 7th, Dong Lei, deputy general manager of Shandong Inspur Ultra HD Video Industry Co., Ltd., the technical research and development team, was interviewed by the Reporter of Qilu Evening News.
Dong Lei said that live television has a number of links to collect, encode, store, broadcast, transmit, decode, display, first of all, the on-site camera to collect video pictures, because the original image is very large, 8K reached 4 channels 12Gbps code stream, which requires the video signal to be efficient lossless compression and coding and then stored, broadcast, and then transmitted to the terminal decoding equipment for decoding, decoding equipment will restore the decoded image to ultra-high-definition signal on the TV or outdoor large screen presented.
In terms of ultra-high-definition technology, Japan and South Korea are leading in 4K technology, but China's 4K technology has the highest global penetration rate. 4K technology has evolved for less than 10 years to reach the 8K era. In terms of 8K coding technology, at present, only the AVS3 standard with independent intellectual property rights released by China and an open source coding technology standard released by Google are currently available. It can be said that in the development of 8K technology and industry, China has been at the forefront of the world.
The advantage of China's AVS3 standard is that it is compressed and encoded in high fidelity, and the compression rate is more than 20% higher than that of previous technologies. Based on this standard, Inspur, as a decoder terminal manufacturer, and CCTV Main Station have carried out multiple adaptation tests and tuning to ensure true and smooth restoration of the live picture.
During this period, because the technology has been iteratively updated, the ordinary decoder has been unable to solve the latest 8K encoding format, the need for technical iteration upgrades, Inspur ultra-high-definition team hard work, optimize the algorithm and equipment master control chip, and finally break through the bottleneck of 8K ultra-high-definition live broadcast technology.
Dong Lei said that the decoding problem is solved, but at present, the outdoor large screen in domestic cities only supports 4K resolution input interface. 8K is an ultra-high-definition resolution, to ensure the visual experience, you need technicians to split the 8K ultra-high-definition video into 4 channels of 4K signals. In the past, this link was completed by high-end servers and GPU equipment, but the decoding efficiency was low and the cost was high, and it often cost hundreds of thousands or millions of yuan.
The Inspur Ultra HD team found an embedded solution that uses a dedicated chip to process 8K video decoding and video segmentation, and uses a combination of software and hardware to greatly improve the efficiency of 8K video processing.
In this solution, the signal is divided into 4 parts, which means that the picture is divided into 4 parts, to achieve seamless splicing and synchronous playback of the 4 parts of the picture, technicians have made thousands of tuning of the large-screen circuit and software parameters, using a lot of AI technology, the delay is controlled within 1 millisecond, 1 second 60 frames, 1 frame is 16 milliseconds, 1 millisecond relative to 1 frame can be negligible, 4 4K pictures can achieve the effect of near full synchronization.
Dong Lei said that this kind of "pixel-level" splicing has become the most difficult point of this technological breakthrough, a pixel can not be bad, the picture must be synchronized, otherwise the picture will be torn, at the same time, the Wave team also has to match and dock with a variety of large-screen equipment, and the mainstream splicer manufacturers on the market for product compatibility debugging. The whole team of more than 40 people repeatedly debugged, only the parameter tuning was carried out thousands of times, and the stress test was carried out tens of thousands of times.
This means that the reason why we can see the hair of the athletes with the naked eye is the use of 8K ultra-high-definition decoders, the use of software and hardware combined with embedded solutions, the configuration of 4T computing power NPU, through artificial intelligence algorithms, targeted dynamic adjustment of picture quality, the realization of sports picture compensation and digital noise reduction, through the support of this series of digital technology, only presented.
Because the 8K ultra-high-definition decoder provides 4 times the video picture of 4K, it has reached the limit of human eye vision in terms of clarity, even if it is close to the screen, there is no grainy feeling; at the same time, the brightness, color contrast, and saturation have been greatly improved, thus bringing more delicate picture quality, wider viewing angle, richer color, and full of strong immersion when watching, bringing a more realistic and shocking viewing experience.
In order to prevent black screens, signal interruptions, and ensure the stability and continuity of the live broadcast of the Winter Olympic Games, for the Olympic live broadcast scenario, the Inspur team has iteratively upgraded the technology of the decoder, done a lot of reliability design, and started the backup in time once there is a problem to ensure that the Winter Olympics will be broadcast uninterruptedly.
It is reported that in October last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Central Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the State Administration of Radio and Television, and the Central Radio and Television Corporation jointly launched the "100 Cities and 100 Screens" ultra-high-definition video landing project to promote China's 8K industry. This live broadcast is also the promotion and landing of this project.
In Jinan, supported by the Shandong Radio and Television Network, the engineers of the Inspur and Radio and Television Network sacrificed their rest time and used the two or three o'clock in the morning to work intensively every day to complete the construction and debugging of 8K ultra-high-definition large screens at Jinan Railway Station, Jinan West High-speed Railway Station, Jinan Yaoqiang Airport and Inspur Science and Technology Park before 6:00 a.m. on the 28th of The 28th of The Month.
The person in charge of Inspur ultra-high-definition said that with the continuous maturity of 8K video acquisition, encoding, transmission, production, storage, broadcast, distribution, decoding, and display technology, the products and platforms that realize 8K ultra-high-definition production and broadcasting have landed one after another, and the cost is gradually decreasing.
In the Inspur Ultra HD Technology Innovation Center, the reporter saw that through the home level 8K camera, broadcast level 8K encoder, video transmission system and service platform, 1000M optical fiber network, 8K decoder, plus an 8K TV set or a set of 8K LED large screen, hundreds of thousands of yuan can achieve a basic version of the 8K ultra-high definition signal live broadcast. Of course, to achieve professional level 8K, especially in the hundreds of square meters of large screen playback 8K, the cost is relatively high, a simple large screen cost of millions of yuan, the whole system in tens of millions of units.
With the advancement of technology, in 2022, Inspur has the ability to make the 8K large screen within one million will exceed 165 inches in size, and by 2025, the large-size 8K TV set within ten thousand yuan will enter the homes of ordinary people, and 8K ultra-high definition will be widely used in the family, education, tourism, medical, e-sports and other scenes, opening a new door to the "meta-universe".