LANCASTER, Pa.—Chinese Central Television (CCTV), the state television broadcaster in mainland China, has put the Linear Acoustic LA-5269 Dolby Digital/Plus Transcoder on the air at its newly-built “100 percent HD-ready” broadcast facility in Beijing.
Xu Gangming, director of CCTV’s Transmission Department, was quoted in the announcement saying the system plays a critical role in MCR. “It has not only simplified the system structure but also provides stable, high-performance 5.1-channel surround encoding for our HD channels.”
The LA-5269 can encode, decode and transcode popular multichannel audio formats. Metadata is supported via an RS-485 connection and can be extracted from an applied HD- or SD-SDI signal. Dual-redundant internal power supplies are standard; SNMP and Dolby E decoding are available options.
The ability to handle program metadata is a priority for CCTV, the supplier said. Most of its programming relies upon static metadata, but from time to time the ability to handle dynamic metadata is required. The LA-5269 handles both types. The ability to accept SDI input, which simplifies workflow in the new facility, also was a factor.
According to the company, Linear Acoustic LA-5269 transcoders are in operation at Chinese Central Television on CCTV-3 (Arts and Entertainment), CCTV-5 (Sports), and CCTV-8 (Series Television), and will eventually be installed on all 24 CCTV HD channels, which are accessible to more than 1 billion viewers.
