New Perseus Compression Codec Claims 3 Times Efficiency of H.265

A new signaling compression system called Perseus, now being promoted by British tech company V-Nova, hails from Milan, Italy, and claims three times the efficiency of existing codecs such as H.265, V-Nova’s website shows. Perseus was heavily pitched by V-Nova Executive Chairman Eric Achtmann at a recent SES Ultra HD conference in London. “We can deliver UHD at HD bandwidth, around 6 Mbps, or HD with SD bandwidth,” Achtmann told the conference. “We can get 4K over 3G or 4G mobile links. We can use the existing TV infrastructure for UHD.” V-Nova's company backgrounder page claims Perseus support from such heavy industry hitters as Broadcom, Intel and Nvidia and that the company is seeking a vice president-sales, North America to promote further adoption. At the London conference, Achtmann neither demonstrated Perseus nor gave technical details. But we found about two dozen patents for Perseus filed over the past five years by V-Nova founders Guido Meardi, the company’s CEO, and Luca Rossato, its chief scientist. Key U.S. patents and patent applications (2013/0301946, 2014/0321555 and 8,531,321) describe a tiered or hierarchical approach to compression. The original signal is encoded at SD or HD quality using a standard system such as MPEG, enabling this baseline version to be played on existing equipment, the patents show. Perseus additionally layers on a higher-quality version, with more pixels or more frames per second, they say. The difference between the two versions is then used to generate a proprietary helper signal, which is transmitted or recorded alongside the basic signal, they say. A standard decoder processes the basic signal and ignores the helper, while a new decoder uses the helper to reconstruct the higher-quality version, thus making Perseus backward-compatible, they say. The composite signal containing both versions can be broadcast over a conventional MPEG transport stream, or recorded onto a Blu-ray and carried by standard HDMI and DisplayPort connectors, they say. In each case, the helper metadata is ignored by existing equipment, but exploited by a new decoder, they say. Several different helpers can be bundled together with the same baseline signal, the patents say. For example, one helper can add pixel detail, while another adds higher frame rate, they say. The multiple helpers can be used individually or together, so the final signal quality is matched to the capability of a consumer’s display, they say.