Thomson's Film Grain Technology Specification Approved by DVD Forum

[bobgpsr]

This technology would also help to reduce the required size to encode film. I wonder if it will possibly degrade the quality a little bit though.

Bob

Thomson's Film Grain Technology Specification Approved by DVD Forum

Thomson announced that leading consumer electronics, software and technology companies are implementing its Film Grain Technology.

Developed by Thomson's Technology division in collaboration with its Technicolor business, Film Grain Technology was recently adopted as a Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) registered disclosure document. Consumer electronics giants Toshiba and RCA; technology innovators Broadcom, Sigma Designs, Horizon Semiconductors and NVIDIA; and software leaders Microsoft and Sonic Solutions are set to deploy Film Grain Technology, with two Toshiba HD DVD players, an RCA HD DVD player and a Broadcom IC decoder now entering the marketplace.

"As soon as we identified the impact of advanced compression on film grain, we set our minds to developing Film Grain Technology," said Jeff Cooper, head of Thomson's Princeton Corporate Research Center. "The industry's adoption of our solution is great recognition for our hard work in support of next generation entertainment."

Broadcom's BCM7411D and Horizon Semiconductor's Hz100 and Hz300 are integrated solutions that will incorporate Film Grain Technology and Sigma Designs will offer an IC solution, as well. Sonic Solutions is integrating Film Grain Technology in its HD DVD production tools. NVIDIA is building hardware-accelerated Film Grain Technology for its line of Quadro Graphic Processing Units and InterVideo and CyberLink are integrating the technology into their personal computer HD DVD players. Finally, all HD DVD players will be manufactured with Film Grain Technology, notably RCA's HDV5000, Toshiba's HD-A1 and HD-XA1, and Microsoft's Xbox 360 HD DVD Player.
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[bobgpsr]

As a followup to my concerns about quality. Only H.264 AVC has provisions (a flag) for this FGT film grain removal (at encode time) and restoration (at decode time). The VC-1 codec which all US HD DVDs have used so far does not support FGT (and may never per some Microsoft employee comments). I think some of the Japanese encoded HD DVDs released in Japan have used AVC.

Bob