SANTA CLARA, CALIF.—Telairity has upgraded its flagship BE8600 H.264/AVC contribution video encoder with a new 10-bit 4:2:2 mode. The encoder is designed for backhaul, broadcasting, cable casting and IPTV.

4:2:2 encoding preserves high-color fidelity in source video by keeping twice as many color bits as are retained in 4:2:0 compression. Holding other factors constant, the extra "chroma" bits boost bitrates by one-third. Raising RGB (Red-Green-Blue) primary color channels from 8-bits to 10-bits multiplies the available color palette by a factor of 64, from about 16M "mixed" colors to over a billion. This improvement requires a further 25 percent increase in bitrates.

For example, a 15Mbps 4:2:0 stream needs to be raised to 20Mbps to accommodate the additional chroma bits retained in 4:2:2 encoding, then further increased to 25Mbps to enable "giga-color" 10-bit mode.

Other new NexGen features now under development include passing RP188 time code triggers and KLV metadata, and an upgrade from 8 to 16 channels of audio per video channel.

Telairity partner Primecom Technologies LLC will demo both the half-width BE8600 contribution encoder and full-width BE8650 paired encoder/modulator system at its booth, N3233SUL. Video Clarity will also demo Telairity's BE8740 4-channel distribution encoder at its booth, SU12413.