IP transmission system for digital cinema using 2048 scanning line resolution

We introduce a prototype digital cinema system that can store, transmit, and display extra high quality movies with the scanning resolution of 2048 lines. The system was designed to distribute cinema contents on optical IP networks offering Gigabit Ethernet. The system combines a video server, a decoder, and a projector to show movies of 3840 × 2048 pixels with 24 bit color depth at 24 frames per second. Films are digitized and compressed by motion JPEG. The streams, which average 250 Mbps, are continuously transmitted from the PC-based server to the real-time decoder using TCP/IP. The real-time decoder is a cluster of parallel JPEG processors to decode the received streams into uncompressed movie data (4.5 Gbps). The projector uses three LCD panels, each offering 8 million-pixels, and an all-digital video interface in order to enhance the quality of the digital cinema.