BURNABY, British Columbia, November 6, 2018 – NETINT Technologies, a developer of innovative silicon solutions for data-intensive applications, today announced the Codensity™ T400 Video Transcoder, a video encoding solution that enables video streaming content providers and video distribution service providers to transcode and deliver live video streams, gaining improved economics, reduced equipment costs, improved power savings, and simplified integration. The T400 Video Transcoder combines System-on-Chip (SoC) densities and performance, with scalability and flexibility from cloud storage innovations, to deliver breakthrough scalability and economics.
Codensity™ T400 Video Transcoder reduces H.264 AVC and H.265 HEVC encoding costs, equipment, and power requirements to help the live video streaming industry scale
The Cisco 2018 Visual Network Index reports that live video will grow 15x from 2016 to 2021. These live video streams need to be compressed and encoded, while maintaining high visual quality, before they can be delivered to a variety of end devices – from 4K UHD video screens to tablets and smartphones – meeting viewers’ expectations to be able to watch high-quality video when they want to, on any device, anywhere.
The most common codec used today for compression and transmission of video content is the H.264 AVC video encoding standard. The newer H.265 HEVC video delivers equivalent quality to H.264, while achieving approximately a 50 percent reduction in file size and bandwidth requirements, making it the codec of choice for newer video endpoints and devices. Transcoding between H.264 and H.265 is a common requirement for video streaming applications and services; however H.265 requires approximately 10x the processing power of comparable H.264 video quality, limiting the scalability of software or GPU-based video encoding solutions. The industry needs pragmatic solutions beyond filling data centers with racks of servers and GPUs running software encoding to meet the forecasted growth in live video streaming.
“Properly encoded video delivers two benefits for live streaming providers: It can minimize content distribution network costs and it can maximize end user quality of experience,” said Dr. Lei SUN, Principal Scientist of Wangsu Science & Technology. “Video encoding using high efficiency codecs such as H.265 requires significant computing power and expense. Solutions like the Codensity T400 promise to deliver improved density and performance, which will correspondingly reduce encoding processing hardware and costs for live video streaming producers and service providers looking to profitably expand their business opportunities.”
“Our live streaming volumes are growing rapidly. However, our encoding costs are growing faster,” said Yongjun Yu, Director of YY.com Purchasing Center. “Our current encoding solutions require excessive ongoing investments, costs, and large buildouts. Our first impressions from early evaluations of the Codensity T400 solution in our labs indicate high encoding quality – equivalent or better than our encoding outputs today. The Codensity T400 encoding and transcoding solution promises to improve density, with lower operating, space, and power costs, while delivering high quality video suitable for an improved Quality of Experience for our subscribers.”
Powerful Video Encoding and Transcoding Designed for Cloud Scalability
The Codensity T400 Video Transcoder combines the benefits of two different areas of technology innovations to solve encoding scalability challenges for live video streaming – SoC-based encoding densities and economics, with the flexibility and scalability of NVMe cloud infrastructure. It provides highly optimized encoding, transcoding, and transrating for H.264 AVC and H.265 HEVC workloads. Key benefits include:
- High Density Real-time 4K UHD Video Transcoding: The core technology inside each T400 module is the Codensity G4 System-on-Chip (SoC), which supports a highly optimized ASIC-based H.264 and H.265 video codec. By leveraging ASIC’s computing efficiency, the T400 can support a staggering encoding throughput of 60 frames per second (fps) of 4K UHD video, or 8x 1080p streams at 30 fps per T400 module. This delivers a significant improvement in real-time transcoding density compared to software or GPU-based transcoding solutions, driving down processing equipment costs, rack space, power and cooling requirements.
- Scalability by Leveraging NVMe Data Center Infrastructure: The T400 Video Transcoder offers an elegant, yet effective hardware architecture for transcoding scalability by tapping innovations from the storage industry. It leverages the PCI Express® 2.5” U.2 form factor, the form factor used by SSDs, as well as NVMe™, a high performance, low latency, and extensible interface protocol for fast storage I/O. Server vendors already offer a variety of products designed to host multiple U.2 NVMe bays. Video distribution service providers can use these NVMe servers to add transcoding capacity that scales by plugging T400 U.2 modules into the NVMe bays. A mid-range Intel® multi-core 1U server with ten NVMe bays hosting ten T400 modules can support 80x simultaneous H.265 1080p30 real-time encoding sessions.
- High Power Efficiency: Each T400 module consumes only 6W of power at full load. A 1U server with ten T400 U.2 modules delivers a highly efficient video transcoding solution that consumes 80 percent less power than a software transcoding solution.
- High Quality Encoding: The Codensity T400 solution delivers high quality encodings using real-time settings, as well as “slow” presets for even higher quality encoding.
- Predictable Latency: The T400 Video Transcoder delivers predictable low latency video transcoding, even under high load across simultaneous sessions.
- Operational Integration with FFmpeg Library Support: FFmpeg is an open source software library with a vast suite of video processing functions. The Codensity solution includes a highly-efficient FFMPEG compatible SDK, allowing service providers to simply apply an FFmpeg/libavcodec patch to complete the integration. The libavcodec patch on the host server functions between the T400 NVMe interface and the FFmpeg software layer, allowing existing video transcoding applications already using FFmpeg to achieve quick and significant performance and capacity upgrades with Codensity T400 Video Transcoders.
“The explosive and ongoing growth in video streaming volumes is driving the need for economical, scalable encoding solutions for the video streaming industry,” said Tao Zhong, CTO, NETINT. “Our Codensity T400 Video Transcoder is an innovative encoding architecture that lowers the costs, space and power requirements to deliver video streaming services. Using our technology, video content providers can profitably scale their streaming video businesses, while delivering the high quality of experience that users expect. I am very pleased by the results that are being achieved in our early customer trials with Codensity.”
Learn More about Codensity at Streaming Media West Conference
NETINT will be speaking at the Streaming Media West conference, November 13-14 in Huntington Beach, California. Ray Adensamer, NETINT Director of Marketing, will present “Encoding at Scale for Live Video Streaming” on Tuesday, November 13 at 11:30am. To schedule a meeting with NETINT during the conference, contact info@netint.cn.
Resources
Availability
The Codensity T400 Video Transcoder solution is available today for early customer trials, with general availability planned in Q1 2019. Contact info@netint.cn for more information.
About NETINT Technologies
NETINT Technologies is a developer of intelligent silicon solutions for data-intensive applications. Its Codensity portfolio enables enterprise, cloud data centers and content providers to deploy high performance applications that they can scale without limit, while minimizing their data storage and video processing costs. NETINT, founded by an experienced team of storage SoC veterans, is a Canadian venture-funded startup with R&D facilities in Vancouver and Toronto. For more information, visit www.netint.ca.
