The Diamonds judges agreed ARRIS had a “solid” video transcoder in its VIPr offering, but its new audio normalization feature is a “significant added benefit,” promising to address the highly troublesome issue of varied audio levels between programs and advertisements.
The patent-pending feature continuously measures and calculates a running average of the audio levels in the video stream. It adjusts relevant parameters in an advertisement’s audio bit stream by instructing the set-top box to reduce audio levels to approximately the same level as the program audio, ARRIS specs indicate. Meanwhile, the VIPr platform continues to simplify headend complexity by putting decoding, recoding and closed-loop multiplexing on a single Intel quad-core chipset.The product simply didn’t score higher with the judges because of some unknowns that may become clearer after the patent process is complete. One judge desired greater specificity on exactly how the normalization is achieved, how effective the process is, and whether it meets/exceeds requirements by the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) act, the ITU-R BS.1770 Recommendation, and the ATSC A/85 RP method.http://www.arrisi.comSee them at Cable-Tec EXPO, booth 873Return to the BTR Diamond Technology Reviews Elite.
