A new spec and industry association promises to do for the security/surveillance video business much of what the recently completed U.S. DTV transition did for the broadcast industry — upgrade to High Definition without rocking the boat too much. The new organization is called the HDcctv Alliance, and their not-quite-ready for prime time v 0.9 spec (v 1.0 is due out in September) is intended to deliver a plug and play replacement for the cameras, DVRs, and display screens used in surveillance video.
The system uses existing coaxial cable, but replaces the analog standard definition video signal with SDI (Serial Digital Interface) serial digital data — the same format the broadcast industry uses for sending uncompressed video around a TV studio. (Currently SDI cable runs of up to 100-meters are achievable, and it’s expected that up to 300-meter runs will be possible in the near future.)
According to Todd Rockoff, president of the new organization, this SDI technology has numerous advantages over IP video, which currently appears to be the rage in the security video business.
“There’s currently a disconnect between the needs of the industry and what manufacturers make,” Rockoff told Video/Imaging DesignWire. There are many problems relating to replacing tradition CCTV analog technology with IP video systems, beginning with the cabling itself.
“If you already have coax cable installed, then replacing it with CAT5 is no bargain,” Rockoff said. Additionally, building analytics into the camera, rather than end user DVR, makes the cameras susceptible to Moore’s Law and guarantees they’ll be outdated within a few years — unlike the analog cameras whose usable lifespan can be a decade or more.
Manual camera control in PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) domes is often made very cumbersome, if not impossible, by IP video technology that introduces signal delays of a half second or more on “live” display screens. This latency, caused by the encoding and decoding processes required by compressed video, means that when operators use joystick camera controls they find the process very difficult and inaccurate. SDI video is uncompressed, so signal delays are minimal.
“The HDcctv spec is about the link, not the overall system,” Rockoff said. “CCTV starts with ‘closed circuit,’ and the Internet is certainly not a closed circuit,” he added.
Gennum, one of the founding members of the HDcctv alliance, is significantly lowering the cost of SDI silicon as part of this effort, in a strategy to expand the market for SDI by several orders of magnitude compared with the relatively small (but upscale) broadcast TV market. The BOM for the link hardware built into an HDcctv camera will be under $15, Rockoff predicted.
The HDcctv spec is now going public right on the heels of the recently released PSIA 1.0 spec for surveillance IP video. The two specs reflect very different visions of how security video technology will unfold in the future.
The roadmap for the HDcctv spec calls for 1.0 in September. Then the 2.0 spec will incorporate PTZ control. The 3.0 spec will add bi-directional audio. And the 4.0 spec will include 25-watts of power over coax, for one-cable camera installation.
For more information, visit www.highdefcctv.org.
