Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS

HE-AAC, HE-AAC v2

Established world-wide for TV broadcast and streaming applications

 

Over the last couple of years, HE-AAC has become one of the most important enabling technologies for state-of-the-art multimedia systems. Thanks to its unique combination of high quality audio, low bit rates and audio-specific metadata support, it is the perfect audio solution even over channels with limited capacity, such as those in broadcasting or for adaptive streaming standards such as MPEG-DASH.

HE-AACv2 is the mandatory stereo codec in the DASH264 Interoperability Guidelines developed by the DASH Industry Forum. HE-AAC 7.1 has also been selected as one of the optional multichannel codecs.

 

HE-AAC is…

  • ... used in TV, radio, and streaming worldwide.
  • ... in more than ten billion devices already today.
  • ... fully compatible with all relevant broadcast metadata.
  • ... supported and maintained by Fraunhofer IIS.

 

Quality

 excellent, according to EBU test (for complete results see whitepaper below)

Bit rates

 HE-AAC: 48 to 64 kbit/s Stereo, 160 kbit/s for 5.1 Surround (HE-AAC: AAC-LC + SBR)
HE-AAC v2: 24 to 32 kbit/s Stereo (HE-AACv2: AAC-LC + SBR +PS) for good quality audio

Sampling rates

 24 to 96 kHz

Channels

 mono, stereo, multichannel (e.g. 5.1, 7.1, ...)

Used in

 DVB, ISDB , SBTVD, DAB+, DRM+, DRM, ATSC-M/H, ISDB-Tmm, DVB-H, DMB, 3GPP, mobile phones, audio and video streaming services

 

 

Applications

HE-AAC world map
© Andreas Haertle - Fotolia.com / Fraunhofer IIS
HE-AAC world map

HE-AAC for TV Broadcasting

HE-AAC is the predominant codec in most state-of-the-art broadcast and streaming systems. For example, it is part of the DVB toolbox and being used in several European and South American countries. As a result, the majority of HD-capable TV receiver being sold today supports HE-AAC. And, all major broadcast encoder manufacturers included HE-AAC into their devices long ago. Due to this widespread use, HE-AAC can easily be integrated into existing production and distribution chains without great effort.

HE-AAC fully supports all broadcast relevant metadata and any channel configuration from mono to up to 48 channels, including stereo and 5.1 surround. It allows for the additional transmission of side information to enable future TV services, such as the Fraunhofer Dialogue Enhancement technology for improving speech intelligibility.

 

HE-AAC for Radio Broadcasting

HE-AAC is an established codec for radio broadcasting and is used in almost all digital Radio Broadcasting Systems, for example DAB+.  

From transmission to the receiver, Fraunhofer IIS develops and implements all technologies and components needed to build and support radio systems, standards and devices for digital radio. On the broadcast side, the DAB and DRM ContentServer family is a one-box-solution for audio encoding, data service management and ensemble multiplex generation. Fraunhofer IIS audio encoder and decoder offerings cover all major broadcast codecs available today such as MPEG Layer-2 for DAB Classic, MPEG HE-AACv2 for DAB+/DRM or MPEG Surround for high quality multichannel surround programs at stereo bit rates.

 

HE-AAC for Streaming

HE-AAC is the predominant audio streaming codec. All major streaming and media platforms support HE-AAC, for example Flash, Silverlight, Windows Media Player, Winamp, and iTunes. The operating systems Mac OS X and Windows come with HE-AAC as well as the mobile systems iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Symbian and BlackBerry.

Today’s established http adaptive streaming systems such as Apple HLS, Microsoft Smooth Streaming and Adobe Dynamic Streaming are based on codecs of the AAC family.

HE-AAC is also an important part of other streaming standards in the consumer electronics domain, for example Open IPTV Forum, ATIS, HbbTV, and DLNA. As a consequence, almost all digital TVs, BluRay players, set-top boxes and gaming consoles support the codec. This widespread support of HE-AAC, makes it the codec of choice for content providers. That’s why most web radios are based on HE-AAC, as well as services such as Pandora, Aupeo, hulu or BBC iPlayer.

More information

Videos

Please note: Starting a video transfers usage data to youtube.

AAC audio playback tests

Product Brochures