• What is tv-player?
• Who needs tv-player?
• Does tv-player integrates in a current workflow or production pipeline?
• Is tv-player locked to any specific hardware?
• Do I need special hardware to run tv-player?
• Are all features supported on any graphics hardware?
• Does tv-player run on Windows® Vista™?
• Which image formats are supported by tv-player?
• Is there a maximum image size / dimension / resolution?
• What is the maximum playback length of tv-player?
• Is tv-player able to handle more than 2 GigaByte of RAM?
• Does tv-player benefit from multi-processors?
• What operation system do I need to run tv-player?
• Is there a Linux or Mac OSX version of tv-player available?
• What is YUV 4:2:2 colorspace?
• What is RGB 16 bit and dithering?

tv-player is an advanced image sequence playback program specially designed for CG needs of feature film and post production. It is the perfect replacement for

• Maya - FCheck
• Softimage / Shake - Flipbook
• 3ds max - RAM Player
• AfterEffects - RAM Preview
• Nuke - Viewer

tv-player boosts your workflow and productivity at low costs and comes which a rich feature set including:

• judder free tv field playback with real time field order swapping
• full real-time 1080 i+p HD TV and 2k resolution playback*
• full support of all HDR color image formats
  with advanced color controls for OpenEXR and Cineon | DPX
• individual real time alpha-, red, green, blue and luminance channel display
• tv-color preview using hardware accelerated YUV 4:2:2 colorspace*
• dynamic adjustment of any pixel aspect ratio
• clever background loading / caching

During production tv-player can be a replacement for expensive professional equipment such as hard disk recorders or Digi-Betacam VCRs.

tv-player is a very useful tool for people dealing with digital video or animations such as Post-Productions, Animators or SpecialFX and Animation Studios.

Yes. tv-player smoothly integrates in any workflow or production pipeline with a rich set of command line parameters as well as text based settings- and project files.

For 3D artists full seamless integration for 3d studio Max and Maya is also provided.

No, one license can be used non-simultaneously on multiple workstations.

No, tv-player runs on every graphic card supporting Microsoft® DirectX® but we currently support Windows® XP and Windows® Vista™only.

However, there can be huge differences in terms of display quality (hardware accelerated scaling) and playback speed depending on the graphics card chipset, memory bus, memory speed and driver version, parameters tv-player cannot affect.

We recommend a workstation class graphic card with at least 32 MB free dedicated video memory. For smooth real-time HD playback a graphic card with PCI Express® Bus may be required.

Integrated onboard graphic cards using shared system memory like HyperMemory(AMD/ATI), TurboCache(nVIDIA) or Dynamic Video Memory Technology (DVMT - Intel) are not recommended for HD playback.

Click here to get a guide for maximum playback speed.

Yes. We try to test as many graphic configurations as possible but please understand that it is impossible to test them all. All current AMD/ATI, nVIDIA and Intel graphic cards should support all features. If there are restrictions they usually only apply to YUV 4:2:2 display mode.

Yes. Please download the latest version.

tv-player supports a wide range of common HDR image formats with advances controls for OpenEXR and Cineon | DPX, click here for more details.

tv-player reads and playback images with dimensions up to 2048 x 2048 pixels.

The maximum playback length of tv-player is limited only by the amount of free available system memory with a maximum total usage of 2 GigaByte (see below).

If tv-player operates in YUV 4:2:2 or RGB 16 bit colorspace only 2 bytes (16 bit) are needed to store a single pixel, i.e.:

• 5 seconds (125 frames) of PAL Video (720 x 576 pixels) requires about
  100 MB of free RAM.

This is half the amount of memory used by any other available player. Even though today memory is not expensive, it is still the limiting factor in playback length of all RAM based players.

Therefore a special Pro version of tv-player is currently under development.
It will be able to playback minutes of footage in very high quality.

No, unfortunately tv-player can't use more than 2 GigaByte of RAM. So even you have a computer with 4 GigaByte and Windows 64-bit installed, tv-player can only buffer 2 GigaByte of images in memory.

With different color spaces and the current 2GB limitation tv-player can buffer about:

Click here for tv-players exact memory usages per pixel.

Yes, loads images independently in a separate background thread while you can review the entire sequence. So currently you can load two images at the same time.

Calculation of lookup tables for color conversion and loading of OpenEXR files also support multi-threading. Because multi-processor systems become more and more popular, we will add more multi-threading features.

However if your disks or network are slow, multi-threading can't do magic.

tv-player runs on nearly every version of Microsoft® Windows® which supports DirectX®, but currently only Windows® XP and Windows® Vista™ are supported and tested.

No, but we know there is a demand for it.

We already did some successful tests on Mac OS X and Linux, but through the nature of tv-player's direct hardware access to archive the best playback experience, it isn't that simple to port the core to a different operation system.

However, we may consider to develop a a multi-platform version in the future.

YUV colorspace is used by a wide range of professional video equipment like Betacam SP and DigiBeta and also in nearly all digital video codecs, including JPEG, DV, DivX, MPEG 1,2,4. These codecs are used for Video-DVDs, AVI and Quicktime movies and most hard disk recorders.

• Y is the luminance (brightness) component
• U+V are the chrominance (color) components

4:2:2 means that the luminance channel is stored in full resolution (full width and height of the image) and the U+V components are stored in half resolution (half width but full height of the image).This is done to save resources, because the human eye is much more sensitive to luminance than to chrominance (all cats are gray in the dark).

BTW, 4:1:1 finally means that the UV components are stored in quarter resolution (half width and half height of the image).

RGB 16 bit means that 16 bits = 2 bytes per pixel are used to display a color. Usually 24 or 32 bits = 1 byte per Red, Green and Blue channel are used to display a pixel's colors.

Because 16 bit can only display a maximum of 65536 different color shades, which sometimes results in heavy color banding, a technique called dithering is used to reduce color banding and to improve visual image quality.

tv-player can use two different dithering techniques, ordered and diffusion. Ordered dithering is much faster and good for most footage but sometimes produces very light regular patterns, whereas diffusion dithering takes more processing time during image loading and adds a touch of film grain to the image. Click here for a visual dithering guide.

Usually you should not use RGB 16 bit for SD playback, but in case your graphic card or driver doesn't support YUV color space very well, RGB 16 bit runs quickly and smoothly on almost every configuration.