Michael Weitnauer – IRT Lab

Tool for codec-independent NGA productions released

Michael Weitnauer — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 14:55:31 +0000

We are very proud to inform you about the first public release of the “EAR Production Suite”, a free set of tools for producing immersive and personalizable audio content independently from the distribution codec. This open-source project has been developed in (yet) another great collaboration with our colleagues from the BBC R&D audio team under ...

Alternative audio tracks in ARD Player

Michael Weitnauer — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 13:02:41 +0000

We’ve recently teamed up with colleagues from SWR.Online to implement alternative audio tracks in the “ARD Player” for mobile and desktop Internet browsers. This allows ARD broadcasters now to distribute alternative audio versions in addition to the default mix in an efficient manner without extra bandwidth usage. Such alternatives can be for example a “Dialog+” ...

Combining our NGA efforts in an open-source ADM production tool

Michael Weitnauer — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 13:47:40 +0000

If you are following our work towards a truly open and codec-independent workflow for Next Generation Audio, you will have noticed that we not only work together with other broadcasters and industry representatives to define relevant standards for that purpose, i.e. Audio Definition Model (ADM), Serial ADM, the ITU ADM Renderer and further specifications. We ...

The EBU ADM Renderer evolved into the ITU ADM Renderer

Michael Weitnauer — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 07:15:45 +0000

In previous posts we informed about the progress and achievements related to our Next Generation Audio renderer work, especially about the EBU ADM Renderer or simply the “EAR”. At the last ITU-R WP6C meeting in Geneva, where international standards for production and quality topics in broadcasting are discussed and made, we finally achieved one of ...

The EBU ADM Renderer at IBC 2018

Michael Weitnauer — Fri, 19 Oct 2018 07:46:57 +0000

One of the key motivations behind our work is the creation and establishment of open, interoperable standards and formats for broadcasters. For Next Generation Audio (NGA) one of the missing puzzle pieces until recently was an open standard for a renderer. With the publication of Tech 3388 (aka the EBU ADM Renderer (EAR)) and the accompanying ...

European collaboration for open NGA broadcast workflow successfully completed

Michael Weitnauer — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 21:09:38 +0000

More than three years ago, we initiated an European collaboration project called “ORPHEUS” along with our audio colleagues from BBC R&D. Our aim was to develop and establish an end-to-end workflow for object-based audio broadcasting, based on open standards. So we teamed up with major European companies and institutions, which are all experts in their ...

Working on a standardised NGA renderer for the production

Michael Weitnauer — Thu, 05 Apr 2018 13:20:52 +0000

A few years ago, we joined the standardization efforts of NGA (Next Generation Audio) components for the production and distribution environment in ITU-R, EBU, DVB and other organizations. Whilst the standardization for the distribution was already almost established, we spent quite some effort on the production format and the production renderer. After many discussions within ...

Object-based Radio Drama

Michael Weitnauer — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 07:09:06 +0000

Quite some time ago, we published our object-based demo page and posted this article on our blog. The development of the used JavaScript framework of course did not stand still, so we managed to release a new version of our object-based browser rendering framework which is capable of advanced interaction / personalization features such as switch-groups and ...

Bringing object-based audio to the production

Michael Weitnauer — Tue, 20 Jun 2017 08:06:07 +0000

A few months ago, IRT and BR started a collaboration work within the scope of the EU funded project ORPHEUS to produce content for the project pilots. The aim of this project is to implement a complete end-to-end chain, from capturing to consumption for object-based audio. This technology brings great possibilities and features such as interactivity, ...

Object-based audio rendering in browsers

Michael Weitnauer — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 12:46:43 +0000

Object-based audio is a revolutionary approach for creating and deploying interactive, personalized and immersive content. This is possible by representing the audio content as a set of individual assets together with metadata describing their relationships and associations. This allows media objects to be assembled in ground-breaking ways to create new user experiences. Some popular examples ...