Color Extension for the HORACE TV Compression Protocol

Abstract

The HORACE protocol[5] was designed as a common medium of exchange for digitized black-and-white television images at varying resolutions at bit rates from below 9600 to over 50M bits per second. At the 1 time of the protocol’s creation, “hooks” were added to allow use of the system to transmit and receive two-and three-color images from an NTSC, RGBY, RGB, or “S-type” input and produce outputs in the same format, but those systems remained undefined. Two systems implementing various features of the extended color protocol have been built and demonstrated by two different manufacturers, and an effort to standardize the protocol for all users and manufacturers is underway.