History of HD Movies

Posted on August 11, 2009
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Hello friends! Today I’ll post a short list of HDTV History.

The developmental era (1948 – 1970s): low definition TV as high definition TV

From a historical perspective, NTSC or System-M was the first HD television transmission format.System-M held the high definition video monopoly from 1948-1956. The only other existing TV broadcast systems in Europe at the time used either 405 lines (UK, also referred to as System-A) or 441 lines (France, but no system designator was ever issued).When the Europeans standardized on using 625 lines with either PAL and SECAM as the colour standard. Essentially PAL became the globally available high definition video format. The French tried an 819 line system that was Monochrome only, but abandoned it due to interoperability issues and lack of adoption in other countries other than Belgium.

1980s: Great technological leaps into dead ends

Original HD specifications date back to the early 1980s, when Japan developed the HighVision 1125-line TV standard (also called MUSE) that ran at 30 frames per second (frame/s or fps). Japan presented their standard at an international meeting of television engineers in Algiers in 1981 and Japan’s NHK presented its analog HDTV system at Swiss conference in 1983.The NHK system was standardized in the United States as SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) standard #240M in the early 1990s, but abandoned later on when it was replaced by a DVB analog standard. HighVision video is still usable for HDTV video interchange, but there is almost no equipment around to perform this function. All attempts at shoehorning in HighVision into a 6 MHz broadcast channel were mostly not successful. All attempts at using this format for terrestrial TV transmission were forsaken by the mid-1990s.The Europeans developed HD-MAC (1250 lines, 50 Hz) as a video standard, but it never took off as a terrestrial video transmission format. HD-MAC was never designated for video interchange except by the European Broadcasting Union.The current high definition video standards in North America were developed during the course of the advanced television process initiated by the Federal Communications Commission in 1987 at the request of American broadcasters. In essence the end of the 1980s was a death knell for most analog high definition technologies that had developed up to that time.

1990s: DVB and the brushfire of standardization

The FCC process, led by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) adopted a range of standards from interlaced 1080 line video (a technical descendant of the original analog NHK 1125/30 frame/s system) with a maximum frame rate of 30 frame/s, and 720 line video, progressively scanned, with a maximum frame rate of 60 frame/s.In the end however the DVB standard of resolutions (1080, 720, 480…) and frame rates (24, 25, 30) were adopted in conjunction with the Europeans that were also involved in the same standardization process. The FCC officially adopted the ATSC transmission standard (which included both HD and SD video standards) in 1996, with the first broadcasts on October 28, 1998.

2000s: global HDTV adoption, but standardization deteriorates

In the early 2000s it looked as if DVD would be the video standard far into the future. However, both Brazil and China have adopted non-standard video codecs (mp4, and an open-source video codec) that somewhat violate the interoperability that was hoped for after decades of largely non-interoperable analog TV broadcasting. As high definition television has evolved into the mathematical representation of a video signal, and as computing power is so inexpensive these standardization issues so far have been minor.

Source : Wikipedia.org

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