120/140 Mbit/s portable HDTV codec and its transmission performance in a field trial via INTELSAT satellite

摘要

This paper describes a portable HDTV digital codec and its transmission performance obtained in a transpacific field trial via an INTELSAT satellite with a transportable small earth station. This portable codec is designed for transmitting HDTV programs including 4 channels of high quality sound via a 72 MHz bandwidth transponder in an INTELSAT satellite, or via an ISDN H4 channel in an optical fiber submarine cable. In order to realize the portable hardware for practical applications, the codec employs bit-reduction techniques whose algorithms are extremely simple from the viewpoint of hardware construction but are effective in achieving a high coding picture quality. From the results obtained in the field trial, it is concluded that an end-to-end international digital transmission of HDTV programs, wherein HDTV programs can be directly transmitted from the place of an event to a theater, is commercially viable using the codec in conjunction with the small earth station.