High Performance Platforms for Video Encoding – A Preview at IBC 2017

State-of-the-art platforms to enable rapid growth in advanced video formats like HEVC

2017 will perhaps be our busiest year at the IBC show yet. Over the next four days, we will be engaging with several industry players to define the future of their products and solutions, and in turn the future of video encoding itself. We kick started our presence at the event by leading the discussion on AV1 as part of the paper session titled “Beyond HEVC – how to build an even better codec” at the IBC conference yesterday.

The key highlight at the show is our HEVC based solutions that we are showcasing at three different partner booths. Co-incidentally, the latest version of our i265 HEVC encoder is the next in a series of announcements made during the previous IBC events.

• IBC 2014 – We announced the 3rd generation of our encoders, which included our first public demonstration of high performance GPU accelerated HEVC encoding with the Haswell architecture from Intel. We also demonstrated the first prototype of distributed HEVC encoding at the show.
• IBC 2015 –We were the first in the industry to demonstrate live 4Kp60 encoding using the innovative Intel VCA platform launched at the show.

These milestones cover two key themes – hybrid encoding with integrated GPU platforms from Intel and distributed encoding using platforms with multiple such processors. Both the themes have been central to Ittiam’s strategy to achieve the best performance on a single processor and then scale that up to higher resolutions, frame rate and quality. We have been able to do this by intelligently distributing the performance across multiple processors with high data interconnect.

Fast forwarding to IBC 2017, we extend our hybrid and distributed encoding paradigms to another platform that takes the scalability up by several notches. In a press announcement today, we outline a combined solution from Ittiam and Artesyn Technologies that delivers the highest channel density per RU for 4K HEVC encoding using the MaxCore platform. This follows on the heels of a similar announcement with the HPE Moonshot systems at NAB earlier this year.

So if you are at IBC this year, join us for a live demonstration of these solutions or drop an email to
IBC-2017@www.ittiam.com for meetings:

• Scalable, high density 4K encoding on Artesyn’s MaxCore servers with SharpStreamer Pro Cards, at Artesyn Booth #5.C12
• 4K HDR10 encoding in real time on a single Intel Xeon E3 demonstrated on the HPE Moonshot system, at Intel Booth #5.B65

If you want to dive deeper into how we leverage integrated GPUs and distributed architectures to deliver class leading video performance, read our blogs published as part of the Intel Network Builders Program.

• How GPU-Accelerated Encoding Enables Faster, High Quality HDR
• Towards Higher Quality, 4K Video with Distributed HEVC Encoding