Dror Gill, Author at Beamr Blog

2018 Video Trends: 8K Makes a Splash

Posted on January 22, 2018by Dror Gill

At the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, video hardware manufacturers came out swinging on the innovation front—including 8K TVs and a host of whiz-bang UX improvements—leading to key discussions around the business and economic models around content and delivery.

On the hardware side, TV has dominated at CES, with LG and Samsung battling it out over premium living room gear. LG, in addition to debuting a 65-inch rollable OLED screen, made headlines with its announcement of an 88-inch 8K prototype television. It’s backed by the new Alpha 9 intelligent processor, which provides seven times the color reproduction over existing models, and can handle up to 120 frames per second for improved gaming and sports viewing.

Not to be outdone, Samsung has debuted its Q9S 8K offering (commercially available in the second half of the year), featuring an 85-inch screen with built-in artificial intelligence that uses a proprietary algorithm to continuously learn from itself to intelligently upscale the resolution of the content it displays — no matter the source of that content.

The Korean giant also took the wraps off of what it is calling “the Wall,” which, true to its name, is an enormous 146-inch display. It’s not 8K, but it’s made up of micro LEDs that it says will let consumers “customize their television sizes and shapes to suit their needs.” It also said that its newest TVs will incorporate its artificial digital assistant Bixby and a universal programming guide with AI that learns your viewing preferences.

It’s clear that manufacturers are committed to upping their games when it comes to offering better consumer experiences. And it’s not just TVs that are leading this bleeding edge of hardware development: CES has seen announcements around 4K VR headsets (HTC), video-enabled drones, cars that can utilize a brain-hardware connection to tee up video-laden interactive apps, and a host of connected home gadgets—all of which will be driving the need for a combination of reliable hardware platforms, content availability and, perhaps above all, a positive economic model for content delivery.

This year CES provided a view into the next generation of video entertainment possibilities that are in active development. But it will all be for naught if content producers and distributors don’t have reliable and scalable delivery networks for compatible video, where costs don’t spiral out of control as the network becomes more content-intensive. For instance, driving down the bitrate requirements for delivering, say, 8K, whether it’s in a pay-TV traditional operator model or on an OTT basis, will be one linchpin for this vision of the future.

We’re committed to making sure we are in the strongest position to bring our extensive codec development resources to bear on this ecosystem. HEVC, for instance, is recognized to be 40 to 50 percent more efficient for delivering video than legacy format, AVC H.264. With Beamr’s advanced encoding offerings, content owners can optimize their encoding for reduced buffering, faster start times, and increased bandwidth savings.

We’re also keeping an eye on the progression of the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia)’s AV1 codec standard, which recently added both Apple and Facebook to its list of supporters. It hopes to be up to 30 percent more efficient than HEVC, though it’s very much in the development stages.

We’re excited about the announcements coming out of CES this year, and the real proof that the industry is well on its way to delivering an exponential improvement on the consumer video experience. We also look forward to helping that ecosystem mature and doing our part to make sure that innovation succeeds, for 8K in the living room and very much beyond.

Video Trends

CES 2018: 5G, 8K, and Beyond

Posted on January 12, 2018by Dror Gill

5G video and the future of next-gen UltraHD video were hot topics at CES this week. While both technologies are independent of one another, their development – and future success – will have a correlation.

As the standards process for this next generation of wireless makes its way through the 3GPP (commercial networks are expected in 2020), it has become clear that the first 5G use case to see commercial applications will be enhanced mobile broadband or EMBB. That’s great news for the video industry, as 5G’s ultra-low-latency and fiber-esque bandwidth speeds (1Gbps and above) will lend themselves to a range of future-think services. Operators are expecting to support 4K and 8K UltraHD streaming to mobile devices, virtual and augmented reality, fixed wireless triple-play services in the home, streamed 3D modeling and broadcast TV over mobile networks, among other things; with the same video quality consumers expect from their existing TV subscriptions.

It’s an exciting prospect, and wireless infrastructure giants have not been shy in talking up their hopes for 5G. Nokia expects it to be “a seamless web of interconnected intelligence that underpins our digital lives.” Intel has said 5G will “enable new experiences across a variety of industries and categories including automotive, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, homes, buildings, factories, cities, and infrastructure.” And Ericsson, for its part, said that “all this will create opportunities for new use cases that we haven’t yet dreamed of.”

However, in order to make this rosy future come alive, the business models have to make sense. 5G can’t simply be 4G on steroids; kickstarting rather significant initial consumer demand for these brand-new, revenue-generating services will be required to recoup operator investment in this network of the future. 5G will rely on a bevy of cutting-edge technologies to achieve its goals, like network-slicing, massive MIMO, and beamforming, to name a few. In other words, these networks won’t be simple—or cheap—to build. To make it worth their while, operators will need a cache of compelling, high-end services lined up that consumers are willing to pay a premium for in addition to their monthly OTT subscriptions.

The key word there is “compelling.” Offering 4K and 8K streaming to connected TVs as part of an enhanced 5G triple-play package sounds great, but to capture the revenue necessary for the 5G business case to work, service providers will have to make sure these types of services are rolled out with appropriate video quality controls. It’s a well-known phenomenon that as networks get better and quality of service (QoS) and experience (QoE) improve, consumers watch more video—and are willing to pay for high-quality content. Conversely, viewing habits and monetization are adversely affected if the viewing experience isn’t there.

A recent survey conducted by IBM Cloud Video took a look at this and found that when streaming video, 81 percent of consumers experience buffering or delayed load times from 75 percent of respondents in 2016. Also, content recommendations aren’t meeting consumers’ needs for a personalized viewing experience. Only 10 percent of consumers watch either most or all of the shows and movies recommended to them by a streaming service, and 44 percent of consumers say recommendations are rarely or never what they want to watch.

Coming out of CES, we’re expecting to see a rash of 8K, VR, and other emergent technology announcements —fueled by industry leaders such as LG, who used the event to showcase a massive 88” OLED 8K-ready display. At Beamr, we expect 5G, 4K, and reduced video bandwidth to be at the heart of many of the strategic conversations with carriers and service providers as we move into 2018. The picture looks bright, so to speak, for supporting advanced video over 5G with evolved video encoding formats such as HEVC.

If you haven’t had a chance to catch up on Apple’s big news this week, here’s another post you won’t want to miss:

HEVC today. AV1 tomorrow?

4K TV Content Everywhere OTT

CES 2018: Connected TV Tunes into the User Experience

Posted on January 9, 2018by Dror Gill

As we roll into 2018, almost half of all US broadband households (45%) now own a smart TV, according to Parks Associates research – and it’s now the most commonly used platform for watching online video content. At the same time, consumers are getting choosy about their user experience (UX), meaning that key points of differentiation for the connected video device market moving forward will be ease of use, content discoverability and, above all, streaming quality.

Makers of smart TVs and streaming media players are in the process of shifting strategies to focus on the UX, which means beefing up middleware, adding bells and whistles (like intelligent voice control) and implementing strategic advances in video quality optimization, such as support for advanced HEVC encoding.

“Parks Associates’ holiday data found 11% of US broadband households had a strong intention to purchase a 4K/Ultra HD TV this holiday season, but overall, device sales of flat-panel TVs have flattened out,” said Jennifer Kent, director, research quality and product development, Parks Associates. “As a result, we are seeing new partnerships among device manufacturers focused on ways to improve or refresh the UI of the smart TV, to make the device easy to use and a single point of content in the living room.”

When it comes to making UX a key differentiator, improving how users search for and discover new content is a growing battlefield. Consumers are for instance expressing a thirst for cross-catalog, cross-platform search, where results from all video providers are in one place, be they streaming services or linear/traditional pay-TV offerings. To that end, in late 2017, Philips partnered with Roku to launch a line of smart TVs that use Roku’s platform to simplify remote control needs and content navigation.

Meanwhile, voice is making inroads into the connected entertainment area: More than 50% of US broadband households find voice control appealing for entertainment and smart-home devices, according to the Parks survey.

“Voice recognition and control are enabling entertainment equipment manufacturers to improve the user experience. An emphasis on a voice-enabled UX will be a key trend in connected CE for 2018,” said Dina Abdelrazik, research analyst, Parks Associates. “We expect to see more voice innovations in streaming services and connected platforms at CES this year.”

These UX advancements, however, won’t translate into market differentiation without one very important piece: A superior video quality of experience.

On this front, we see moves that place video optimization front-and-center, such as Apple enabling HEVC on up to one billion devices thanks to the release of iOS 11 and High Sierra back in September. Also, video streaming services and hardware manufacturers across the board are reevaluating their codec approaches in light of the fact that HEVC offers significantly improved video quality: Up to 40% greater compression with fewer artifacts and smoother playback than H.264. That also translates to the ability to stream 4K and HDR video over networks with reasonable bandwidth consumption, paving the way for more Ultra HD content availability and thus enhanced consumer demand for those connected devices that support it.

In 2018, a high-quality UX that can woo viewers with the right mix of top-notch streaming quality and advancements in content discovery will no longer be a nice-to-have when it comes to connected TV – it will be a critical linchpin for the competitive landscape moving forward. We expect this to be one of the main conversations at CES this week – and we can’t wait to join in.

AOM AV1 Apple joins AOM Encoder Applications HEVC

HEVC today. AV1 tomorrow?

Posted on January 6, 2018by Dror Gill

In case you missed it, Apple just snuck a little surprise into the first few days of 2018 in the form of their name appearing on the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) website as a Founding Member. As an ardent HEVC supporter, some may be shocked at this move by Apple. Blog post detailing Apple’s HEVC announcement. Now let’s see what it means for HEVC.

As a codec engineering company, Beamr has invested heavily in our HEVC implementation and we are proud of the best in class customers who are using it around the world to distribute video that is higher quality and up to 50% smaller than the H.264 version.

This means we do have a “vested” interest in HEVC being successful. At the same time, whether VP9 or AV1, we are always tracking the development of new codec technology so that we are in the strongest position to bring our extensive codec development resources to bear on market leading solutions.

Though we have an interest in HEVC becoming successful, we have invested resources and continue to do so, in order to understand AV1 in the areas of market readiness and licensing preparedness including IP questions, playback support and more.

In this article I will share the Beamr perspective that Apple joining the AOM reinforces the possibility that AV1 will be the successor to HEVC. However, with 1 billion HEVC enabled end points in the market, HEVC has legs for many years before a sufficiently large AV1 ecosystem will be built.

This position is also in alignment with many of our customers who are serving hundreds of millions of end users and must make codec decisions based on streams they can reliably deliver today.

After all, speculating on what may be coming in the future is not a luxury most of the industry enjoys because if they bet wrong, it could impact tens of millions of users negatively. There is a huge difference between advanced technology development (e.g. what happens in the lab) and the realities of production (that which generates revenue).

Once the AOM locks down the AV1 spec, you can expect many shootouts and comparisons with HEVC to be published. But let’s take a look at how HEVC compares to AV1, given what we know now.

AV1 Readiness compared to HEVC.

HEVC was ratified in 2013 while the AV1 bitstream was set to be frozen in Q1 2017, yet even now the AV1 bitstream has not been completed. Developing software timelines, committing to them, and then meeting them, is far from an exact science. Thus the delay is not completely the fault of the AOM development community since it is endemic to the software development lifecycle. Innovation is difficult to schedule. The point is, AV1 will be ready when it is ready. Which means commercial plans that hinge on the delivery of AV1 before 2020 or 2021 could be at risk given the uncertainty of when the standard will be ratified.

AV1 Compression Efficiency compared to HEVC.

HEVC is recognized to be 40-50% more efficient than AVC (H.264), and AV1 is hoped to be up to 30% more efficient than HEVC (H.265).

However, while HEVC’s compression efficiency has already been reached by advanced encoder implementations such as Beamr 5, AV1’s 30% efficiency claim over HEVC has not been proven outside of an extremely limited (small) set of files.

In any case any improvement can be validated only after the spec is final and the tools included in AV1 are decided upon. At that point the race to realize these gains will start, balancing the computing resources needed and maturing the rate control algorithms. But just as HEVC did not reach its planned 50% efficiency in the first release, taking multiple years to achieve, the AOM developers will need to work very hard for the next 2 to 3 years before significant gains over HEVC will be seen.

AV1 Royalty and IP constraints compared to HEVC.

There are three HEVC Patent pools which license the technology used in HEVC implementations: MPEG-LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media. Both MPEG-LA and Velos Media do not charge license fees for content distribution (See the MPEG-LA HEVC License Summary and the Velos Media FAQ), and HEVC Advance does not charge a license fee for free content distribution, such as public broadcasts and ad-funded commercial broadcasts (see page 3 of the HEVC Royalty Rates document).

Even Technicolor, that licenses its HEVC patents outside of the 3 patent pools, has publicly declared that they will not charge license fees from content providers. In addition, royalty schedules are being (have been) amended down, and it seems the Patent pools are aware that a more friendly approach is needed.

AV1 cannot guarantee a royalty-free offer.

Yes, that’s correct, I said it! Now here’s why.

While AV1 claims to be royalty-free, many industry players have missed the fact that the Alliance for Open Media does not provide indemnification to companies who use AV1 against patent claim violations.

Since some of the algorithms used in AV1 bear a resemblance to corresponding H.264 and HEVC algorithms, there is some probability that the IP in AV1 could infringe on AVC and/or HEVC Patents. In fact, delays to the ratification of the AV1 standard might well be due to legal teams who are examining the final algorithms exactly for these cases.

To be fair, IP questions are hardly ever cut and dried, and there are many unknowns and “what-if’s” to be discussed. But the lack of clarity regarding the AV1 IP situation, and the fact that AOM is not offering indemnification for IP infringement, makes the “royalty free” claim at this point more of a wish than a solid fact.

If you are still not convinced that AV1 offering a royalty-free codec could be problematic, consider that for VP8 and VP9 Google needed to license the H.264 patents from MPEG-LA. If an infringement action is identified with AV1, and if the courts rule in the plaintiff’s favor, the legal exposure will be of the magnitude that headlines will be penned and stock prices hammered. Velos Media, one of the 3 HEVC patent pools, has already warned in its FAQ:

“As it relates to royalties, we know that VP9 incorporates patented technologies, including some of the patents being licensed by Velos Media for HEVC. And, while AV1 has not yet been publicly released, it may also incorporate patented technology from many parties.”

Try slipping that little disclaimer by a corporate IP attorney! When a licensing body directly references a new technology as being possibly infringing, it is worth paying attention to.

Let’s look at why the AOM members feel it’s so important to have a royalty-free platform.

Royalties are a pain, that is, when you are the party that needs to pay. Not only do you need to factor this added cost into your business model but in some cases, the tracking and reporting burden by itself represents a real difficulty and may limit certain business models from being feasible.
You can never know what patent holder’s next demand will be. The HEVC fragmented IP pools and shifting fee structures prove the point. The AOM is absolutely correct in wanting to address this with AV1.
Confusion over who to pay. The lack of clarity overpayments is delaying adoption even further. It seems AOM members are seeking control over a critical component of their technology that is not royalty free.

While all these arguments make sense, AOM cannot guarantee its users that this is a royalty-free codec; all they can suggest is that AOM members will not ask for royalties. But the thousands of patent holders for block-based codecs that are not a part of AOM are still out there, and the generosity of AOM could come at their expense.

For an interesting analysis on the validity and value of the MPEG-LA and HEVC Advance HEVC patent pools, you will want to read this Unified Patents article as it provides a perspective on how the courts look at the patents that are contained in a pool. In short, it’s probably not a wise legal move to assume that the AOM has everyone adopting AV1 “covered.”

AV1 Encoding CPU Performance compared to HEVC.

HEVC encoding CPU performance is advancing at a rapid rate. At IBC 2017 Beamr demonstrated six simultaneous 10-bit 4Kp60 live channels being encoded on a single Intel Xeon Scalable Platinum 8180 dual-socket server.

This encoding speed is in contrast to AV1, which has not been optimized, but is currently running about 100 times slower than real-time on a single server. Aside from the fact that AV1 is not available for low latency live encoding workflows, the operational cost delta of running an AV1 encoding service versus HEVC is staggeringly higher for AV1.

Download the Intel solution guides detailing Beamr HEVC codec SDK performance and applications on Intel processors.

Beamr’s HEVC encoder has been under active development for more than five years, and our CPU performance has been consistently improved by way of algorithmic and code optimizations. AV1 developers will bring improvements to the encoding speed, but it will most certainly follow the same development trend of every codec before it, including HEVC.

In other words, it can only happen over a period of years, and only if a group of dedicated engineers focuses on it day and night. Optimizing a codec is not a hobby. But even in the end after it is fully optimized AV1 will be slower because of the added mathematical complexity needed for it to achieve higher efficiency.

Video distributors with capex, opex, or physical space constraints will find the bitrate efficiency gains of AV1 will come with a very high operational cost. This Jan Ozer article from Streaming Media provides further context on AV1 performance.

AV1 Playback and Decoding Performance compared to HEVC.

HEVC hardware decoder support exists today in more than 1 billion devices spanning the most popular computing and mobile operating systems in the market like iOS, macOS, Android, and Windows. And in addition, low power hardware implementations for HEVC exist on Intel and ARM-based chips, as well as hundreds of millions of SoC’s shipping in CE devices such as TV’s, media players and game consoles. HEVC is a de-facto standard in all UHD TV’s found in the market.

According to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) between 2014 and thru 2017, somewhere in the neighborhood of 175 million UHD TV’s will have been sold. Source: CTA 2017 presentation, data from GfK

This is an impressive HEVC footprint, and it’s only going to grow stronger. In contrast, the only AV1 playback environment available today is an early alpha implementation of the Mozilla browser Nightly build.

As the AV1 spec is not yet locked by the AOM it’s no wonder that when we reached out to the best-known silicon vendors who are supplying the media processing and video decoding chips to the most popular media player vendors, game console makers and TV OEM’s, everyone reported without exception that they cannot begin planning AV1 support in the absence of a ratified spec.

AV1 support in silicon is a minimum of 24 months out (Q1 2020). But silicon is just that, silicon. Chips have to be designed and integrated into consumer products before the advanced capabilities that chip vendors are including can be available. But, this is a chicken and egg situation. Afterall, why would a CE company go through the extra engineering cycles and increase their BOM to support a codec that is yet to be adopted across the ecosystem?

Should Apple influence your codec adoption decision?

With Apple’s commitment to HEVC, it’s a mystery of what their intentions are in joining the AOM. But we do know this – Apple has a solid HEVC roadmap with a vertically integrated HEVC video encoding, distribution and playback technology stack across all devices.

This means that today, you can reach the Apple ecosystem with H.264 and HEVC.

For video distributors looking for smaller bandwidth footprints, opting out of HEVC means they will lose a whopping 54% of the North American mobile market assuming the selected codec isn’t supported by Apple. This is hardly a prospect that any executive or encoding head will agree to, which means the question of whether to support AV1 or HEVC could come down to compatibility.

Any video service unable to match the performance of HEVC on Apple, will have a difficult time competing with services delivering high quality 1080p HD video at bitrates well under 2 Mbps. HEVC is available today across the all too important Apple ecosystem, while AV1 is not supported (today).

HEVC is the codec for today. Is AV1 the codec for the future?

Remember how I said that Beamr is actively tracking all new video technology and codec developments and that this applies to AV1? Well, we do believe that AV1 could be a factor at some point in the future.

There are those who always wait for next years model. The trouble with this approach is that by delaying, you miss out on technology leaps that could have afforded a significant advantage to your company. This is especially true with the decision to move ahead or hold on adopting HEVC in anticipation that AV1 will be cheaper and provide an added efficiency benefit.

The reality is that HEVC is able to reach 40% to 50% efficiency gains over H.264 today. These aren’t theoretical numbers or only possible on a limited set of content. Beamr has customers distributing content around the world, and enjoying bitrate savings in this range. Even Apple in their WWDC2017 announcements of HEVC, used the numbers 40% and 50% savings when talking about their decision to adopt the HEVC standard.

Ask yourself, what is the opportunity cost incurred by continuing with H.264 for the next 24 to 36 months as you wait for a relatively small AV1 playback footprint to emerge?

This is why most of the industry operating a commercial service is opting to realize the benefits of HEVC today while keeping tabs on the development of AV1 (for the future).

Still not sure…

Consider that Amazon Prime and Netflix are both members of AOM. And both are active in AV1 development and testing, yet Amazon and Netflix are users of HEVC.

Why would they do this? It’s simple. HEVC serves them well by being compatible with more than 1 billion devices and enabling premium video experiences at bitrates that are 40 to 50% less than H.264. Now, one may think that HEVC is only being used for 4K content by these services, but we know that Amazon is using HEVC in emerging markets for lower resolutions.

But what about Google, they are Founding members of the AOM and ardent supporters of alternative codecs? It’s interesting to note that Google supports HEVC in Chromecast which is clearly required for content services (some who are in the AOM like Netflix and Amazon) to stream 4K HDR video. But will Google use HEVC for their own services on a wider basis in the future? We do not know.

One situation in the market that must be faced by Google and YouTube is what will happen if Apple deprecates H.264, and mandates all apps that stream video to Apple devices leverage HEVC. Remember Flash? A similar situation occurred with HLS, the mandatory streaming protocol for Apple devices.

Remember how I pointed out that Apple is vertically integrating with HEVC for video and HEIC (HEVC I-frame) for mobile image capture and display? I think now you can see how a codec selection decision by a vendor like Apple can move the entire industry.

Apple has chosen HEVC for production and any video distributor can encode in HEVC and transmit to a user with iOS 11 or macOS High Sierra and know that it will play perfectly.

HEVC is a robust standard that has broad support with extensive development from the largest encoding vendors in the industry. And HEVC is widely adopted on the device side with major services like Amazon, Apple, and Netflix using it now. HEVC is not going away.

Beamr’s view is that HEVC is the codec for today, and AV1 may possibly be the codec of tomorrow. But for sure, with HEVC, we can all enjoy more video and better quality as HEVC enables new applications, experiences, and innovations to be transmitted to users today.

Beamr 5 H.265 HDR Intel Scalable Platinum Processor Live

Beamr Live HEVC Encoding Speed Test on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable Platinum Processor

Posted on November 15, 2017by Dror Gill

It’s no secret that Intel-based hardware is ubiquitous in many video encoding data centers, which explains the high level of interest in the new Intel® Xeon® Scalable Platinum processor family. This article examines the live HEVC 4Kp60 10-bit encoding performance from the perspective of speed with Beamr 5 running on the scalable Platinum 8180 where the results are nothing short of amazing.

Intel is known for pushing the state of art with ever faster and more capable processors, which enable software encoding vendors like Beamr to achieve performance benchmarks some thought impossible. Since Intel’s announcement of their new processor series, Beamr has been excited to see what is possible with the version 5 Xeon® processor.

The result?

Mind-blowing.

Video services needing to encode live 4Kp60 10-bit HDR video can achieve 6 simultaneous streams on a dual-socket Intel® Xeon® Scalable Platinum 8180 processor using Beamr 5 v4.1. This performance represents a 6x speed advantage over x265 and establishes an entirely new benchmark for HEVC software encoders.

CLICK HERE for a speed comparison of the Beamr 5 HEVC software encoder and x265 running on Amazon EC2.

Executive Introduction

As over-the-top (OTT) and IP overtake traditional linear delivery systems, the ability to encode video on software, in real time, is now a requirement.

According to Cisco, consumer Video-on-Demand (VoD) traffic will almost double by 2021. This trend is driven largely by new video services and entertainment formats such as Cloud DVR, UHD (4K), High Dynamic Range (HDR) and 360 degree AR/VR immersive video. These advanced video formats carry with them much greater encoding complexity which places high operational demands on the computing environment. This means more efficient software requires less server time which translates to fewer machines and lower capex and opex.

With content and operational costs rising, and end user pricing under pressure, it is essential for operators to invest in video encoding technology that can provide advanced services in the most efficient way possible. As NFV and virtualized container based architectures advance in the data center, encoding density and speed is becoming a critical vector within the encoder selection process. Also, the ability to operate across a wide range of general purpose platforms is essential. Many GPU bound solutions are inextricably linked to a single processor or limited series. Beamr’s HEVC encoder scales across the entire Intel® Xeon® family.

Apple is playing a pivotal role in enabling the HEVC ecosystem starting with iOS 11 and High Sierra. It is estimated that up to 1 billion devices in the Apple ecosystem can now play HEVC without any special update or third-party apps needed. With HEVC files now supported from big screens to mobile devices, video services can transition their entire library with all resolutions to HEVC, and benefit from the reduced bitrate and improved quality that HEVC is able to deliver. This represents hundreds of thousands if not millions of hours of content needing to be encoded by each video distributor.

With Beamr 5 running on an Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor, video encoding engineers can perform up to 6 times more live video encoding, which leads to a reduction in:

Power
Rackspace
Capital investment

For more background, read Intel’s Solution Brief’s on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor family and the Beamr 5 HEVC video encoder.

6 simultaneous live hevc channels with beamr 5 & intel purley

The new Beamr 5 HEVC software encoder exploits multiple features of the Intel® Xeon® Scalable platform, making it possible to deliver the performance of hardware with the scale and flexibility that only software allows. Beamr 5 is able to utilize the entire range of Intel® Xeon® processors from the entry-level Intel® Xeon® Processor E3 v5 family to the best in class Intel® Xeon® Platinum Scalable 8180 processor. For real-time live video encoding operations that require resolutions up to 4K and frame rates as high as 60 FPS, higher performance means less computing resources required.

Solutions like Beamr 5 running on Intel® Xeon® Scalable Platinum processors contribute to decidedly lower operational and capital investment costs.

In addition to the live workflow benefits, offline VoD applications can also benefit from greater performance as the shorter turnaround time to complete VoD encodes and transcodes means the content will be available for distribution more quickly.

Beamr 5 opens up compelling options for MSOs, CDNs, and broadcasters to build video workflows that exceed their service expansion plans and technical goals while also enabling service operators to deploy media processing workflows across public clouds and on-premise data centers.

With Beamr 5 running on Intel® Xeon® processors, new video encoding workflows can be imagined as edge encoding services running Intel® Xeon® E3 processor-based points of presence (PoPs) for JIT transcoding are now possible. The high performance of Beamr 5 directly enables workflows to be split and re-deployed without a need to redesign workflows.

Beamr’s Next-Generation Video Encoding Technology on Intel

At the foundation of Beamr’s HEVC software encoder is technology that stems from more than a dozen years of codec development by our codec engineering team. Though we’ve developed our solution and technical advantages entirely in-house, working closely with Intel gives us a significant technical and business advantage.

Of the many points related to how we achieved our massive speed advantage, the two we will highlight are motion estimation advantage and micro-level parallelization.

Incoming frames are extensively analyzed by Beamr 5. It is this step which determines the complexity of the scene as rough motion vectors are calculated, and estimates for the bit demand of the encoded frame are made. These estimates guide the second stage of the encoder and allow those activities to focus on visually meaningful aspects of the frame. By partitioning the encoding process, unproductive calculations can be avoided, thus improving the speed of the encoder and the quality it produces.

Second, Beamr 5 features micro-level parallelization which is the result of the codec engineering team leveraging software engineering lessons learned from earlier generations of Beamr real-time software encoders. This experience led the team to design a micro-level parallelization approach that stages portions of the encoding tasks in a controlled manner, staggering their execution so each micro-task begins when the data is available (and still in the cache). This results in wasteful power and CPU cycles spent writing and fetching data being eliminated. Careful design of these micro-tasks assures that they are executed efficiently across the whole frame and in an even manner so that all cores are kept uniformly busy, and none are left waiting for their next task.

Uniquely, the Beamr encoder does not rely on the operating system to manage these critical execution threads but instead is under full control of the pooling and process allocation between the available cores and threads. Beamr’s advanced encoder controls the execution priority based on the availability of pipelined data.

Test Methodology

As in part 1 of our x265 vs. Beamr 5 performance test, we encourage you to experience our speed claims first hand. For qualified video distributors, services and platforms, we are happy to offer a FREE evaluation agreement. To take advantage of this, please contact sales@beamr.com.

The purpose of this test was to measure the speed of Beamr 5 for live encoding applications running on Intel® Xeon® Scalable Platinum processors. In our first comparison of codec performance based on CPU, we decided to run a few comparisons with x265. For this comparison, x265 was benchmarked in its fastest speed setting ‘ultrafast’ – while for Beamr 5 we operated the encoder at its highest speed setting “15” with the performance boost modifier ‘TURBO1’ which activated our latest algorithmic improvements that are available in version 4.1. (All files were 4Kp60.)

For this second test, we wanted to dig deeper using Beamr 5 version 4.1 running on the same 2S Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8180 processor-based machine that we tested with in September, to see what gains were possible. What we found was nothing short of stunning.

In Graphic 1, HTOP shows Beamr 5 loaded 108 threads (from 112 available) at an impressive 90% utilization rate. This demonstrates the high degree of effectiveness with our Intel specific optimization.

Graphic 1: HTOP Intel 8180 dual socket 108 thread utilization at 90% across each thread.

More speed and performance benchmarks from Intel: CLICK HERE.

Conclusion

The drive to increase density with software-based video encoding and transcoding infrastructure is key to securing a competitive advantage for multi-service operators, OTT video distributors, and content distribution networks. At the same time, video architects must enable encoding and delivery of advanced entertainment content, by embracing new technologies, capabilities, and codecs such as HEVC, HDR, and 4K.

With a Beamr + Intel® Xeon® optimized video encoding solution, density – efficiency – quality – and flexibility of video encoding operations for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid data centers can be realized. Beamr 5 running on Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors offers TCO benefits and provides a meaningful improvement to the video processing capabilities of any video distribution solution.

If you missed part 1 of this post, be sure to check it out since additional technical details about Beamr 5 and its operational and performance advantages against x265 were specifically discussed. Find the x265 vs. Beamr 5 Speed Test here.

4K TV Beamr 5 Content-Adaptive Encoder Applications H.265 HDR HEVC IBC Mobile Video OTT Reduce Bitrate

How to deal with the tension on the mobile network – part 2 (VIDEO Interview)

Posted on October 31, 2017by Dror Gill

In late July, I reported on the “news” that Verizon was throttling video traffic for some users. As usual, the facts around this seemingly punitive act were not fully understood, which triggered this blog post.

At IBC last month (September 2017), I was interviewed by RapidTV where much of the conversation was around the Apple news of their support for HEVC across the device ecosystem running iOS 11 and High Sierra. As I was reviewing this interview, it seemed natural to publish it as a follow up to the original post.

There is no doubt that mobile operators are under pressure as a result of the network crushing video traffic they are being forced to deliver. But the good news is that for those operators who adopt HEVC, they are going to enjoy significant bitrate efficiencies, possibly as high as 50%. And for many services, though they will chose to take some savings, this means they’ll be able to upgrade their resolutions to full 1080p while simultaneously improving the video quality they are delivering.

I hope you find this video insightful. Our team has a very simple evaluation offer to discuss with all qualified video services and video distributors. Just send an email to sales@beamr.com and we’ll get in touch with the details.

Beamr 5 H.265 HEVC Live OTT x265

The Need for Speed: x265 & Beamr 5 Epic Face Off

Posted on September 8, 2017by Dror Gill

UPDATE 11/15/2017: Be sure to check out part 2 of this post which covers Beamr 5 performance on the new Intel Scalable Platinum processor.

This article offers a comparison between the performance and quality of the Beamr 5 HEVC software encoder, and the open-source x265 software encoder.

There should be no debate over which standard will be the next generation winner with Apple’s adoption of HEVC (H.265). As the leading HEVC commercial software encoder implementer, we see video distributors who were waiting on the sideline prior to Apple’s announcement jumping into evaluations now that Apple has released the public versions of iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra.

The criteria for determining the best HEVC implementation will vary across application and service type and the business model of the video service will influence the decision of which solution to use. Yet, there is one factor that should be at the top of the decision tree for software based video encoders, and that is the performance (speed) of the encoder.

If you operate the encoding function for a live streaming service, then the performance and speed of your encoder is already top of mind, and the benefits of a solution which is 2 times faster is understood. But for those who operate SVOD and VOD services, the need to measure performance may not be as obvious. Read on to discover the benefits of operating a software encoder that is 2x faster.

Why a speed “face off”?

There is an inherent tradeoff between speed and quality with video encoder’s. With unlimited computing resources, one simply needs to apply the appropriate CPU power to meet the quality objective being targeted. In the case that an encoder is slow and inefficient, provided it can deliver the desirable quality, one can always reach the quality target if sufficient computing power is available. But, in the real world, there are constraints that cannot be ignored- whether budget, power, or space in the rack, few services have the luxury of operating as if they have unlimited computing resources. Which is why CPU performance is as critical an evaluation vector as absolute quality.

With Beamr 5 you will experience the following operational benefits as a result of the encoding operation being up to two times faster than x265 (based on the settings applied).

Up to half the server resources compared with x265
50% of the power utility draw compared with x265
50% less cooling and connectivity cost
Half the rack space

Evaluating Software Video Encoders

First, let’s examine the correlation between speed and quality by taking a look at the world’s best HEVC software video encoder, Beamr 5, as compared to the free open source alternative, x265.

The complexity of video encoder evaluations is such that you must understand not only what video files were used for the input, but also the precise settings (configuration) used. For this speed and quality evaluation you will note that x265 offers ten (10) performance presets that do a reasonable job of balancing the encoder’s speed and efficiency. Beamr 5 has a similar parameter named ‘enc_speed’ where there are a total of sixteen (16) levels available.

Out of the box Beamr 5 offers more granularity in its speed selection than x265, allowing for easier and more precise tuning across a wider range of computing platforms and architectures. However, to ensure an “apples to apples” comparison, other than matching the speed preset of each encoder, all other default parameters were left unchanged.

We want you to experience Beamr 5’s speed and quality first hand which is why we’ve provided the x265 settings that were used for each test. Readers are encouraged to duplicate the same tests, and we have provided download links for all files so that you can run your own independent analysis. Don’t believe our results? You can check them yourself.

As a commercial vendor working with the largest OTT and broadcast customers in the world, we design our products to be maximally usable by any video encoding engineer operating a video service. For the analysis we used x265 ‘veryslow’, ‘medium’, and ‘ultrafast’ settings since this test was designed to mirror real world use cases and not theoretical targets of either extreme speed or quality.

At Beamr we are all about the numbers, but as all video encoding engineers say, the eyes never lie. After you review the data in the charts below, please download the corresponding files so you can see for yourself Beamr 5’s superior quality.

We start with comparing the highest video quality modes of both encoders, akin to what an SVOD service may use, and move to slightly reduced video quality, but with faster performance needed for real-time (live) applications. Here we can demonstrate that Beamr 5 ‘enc_speed 0’ is much faster than the ‘veryslow’ x265 preset, while at the same time Beamr 5 produces better overall video quality.

The original source files can be downloaded from https://media.xiph.org/video/derf/, and converted from .y4m to yuv using the following FFmpeg command:

$./ffmpeg.exe -i Netflix_BarScene_4096x2160_60fps_10bit_420.y4m -f rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p Netflix_BarScene_4096x2160_60fps_8bit_420.yuv

All Beamr 5 and x265 encoded files may be download from the links in the following tables or by click here. (all files were encoded in 4K resolution)

To aid in your subjective visual evaluation we suggest that you use a video comparison tool that is capable of rendering two videos in sync on the same screen. If you do not have a copy of Beamr View (formerly VCT), you may request a copy here. Beamr provides a limited license to our PC and Mac HEVC and H.264 software viewing tool FREE of charge to qualified video distribution services, content owners, and video platforms.

Test machine spec used for all clips: Amazon EC2 c3.4xlarge instance, Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 @ 2.8GHz (16 threads), 30GB RAM, 160GB SSD.

Encoder versions: x265 version 2.5 release candidate 7/13/2017, Beamr 5 version 4.0

Highest Quality VOD Settings Comparison

The following chart provides a comparison of CPU performance at the maximum encoding quality with x265 configured at the ‘veryslow’ setting and Beamr 5 working at speed 0. The following chart shows the ability of Beamr 5 to produce higher video quality with much greater speed than x265. All other configuration settings were unchanged, except those required to align both codecs in keyframe interval, rate control limitations, and appropriate multithreading settings.

Table 1: Highest quality (VOD) configuration.

These are the settings used to test the highest quality presets (Beamr 5 enc_speed 0, x265 preset ‘veryslow’)

Command line example for x265 Highest Quality VOD setting:

$./x265 – –input BarScene.yuv – –input-res 4096×2160 – –frames 1200 – –fps 60 – –preset veryslow – –keyint 90 – –pools 16 – –bitrate 7000 – –vbv-maxrate 14000 – –vbv-bufsize 112000 – –hrd –o x.265

Table 2: Comparing highest quality (VOD) settings – Beamr 5 vs. x265.

Screen capture 1: Highest quality (VOD) settings Beamr 5 vs. x265.

4K resolution video ‘Aerial’ frame 228, left side is Beamr 5, right side is x265. Beamr 5 is 83% faster than x265 with slightly better quality.

click to enlarge photo to actual size | click to access video files

Screen capture 2: Highest quality (VOD) settings Beamr 5 vs. x265.

4K resolution video ‘Ritual Dance’ frame 166, left side is Beamr 5, right side is x265. Beamr 5 is 71% faster than x265 with noticeably better quality.

click to enlarge photo to actual size | click to access video files

Screen capture 3: Highest quality (VOD) settings Beamr 5 vs. x265.

4K resolution video ‘Driving POV’ frame 234, left side is Beamr 5, right side is x265. Beamr 5 is almost twice as fast as x265 at 98% with demonstrably better video quality.

click to enlarge photo to actual size | click to access video files

Comparing High Quality Settings

With x265 set to the ‘medium’ preset and Beamr 5 ‘enc_speed’ set to 3, we observed that Beamr 5 maintained a 15% to 50% speed advantage over x265 while Beamr 5 consistently produced better quality. As with all other tests, configuration settings were unchanged, except those required to align both codecs in keyframe interval, rate control limitations, and appropriate multithreading settings.

Table 3: High quality preset configuration.

Command line example for x265 High Quality setting:

$./x265 – –input BarScene.yuv – –input-res 4096×2160 – –frames 1200 – –fps 60 – –preset medium – –keyint 90 – –pools 16 – –bitrate 7000 – –vbv-maxrate 14000 – –vbv-bufsize 112000 –hrd –o x.265

Table 4: High quality preset performance Beamr 5 vs. x265.

Screen capture 4: High quality settings Beamr 5 vs. x265.

4K resolution video ‘Wind and Nature’ frame 518, left side is Beamr 5, right side is x265. Beamr 5 is 50% faster with a slight edge on video quality over x265.

click to enlarge photo to actual size | click to access video files

Screen capture 5: High quality settings Beamr 5 vs. x265.

4K resolution video ‘Ritual Dance’ frame 565, left side is Beamr 5, right side is x265. Beamr 5 is 50% faster than x265 and Beamr 5 has a definite edge on video quality.

click to enlarge photo to actual size | click to access video files

Screen capture 6: High quality settings Beamr 5 vs. x265.

4K resolution video ‘Pier Seaside’ frame 18, left side is Beamr 5, right side is x265. Beamr 5 is 43% faster than x265 and Beamr 5 has noticeably better video quality.

click to enlarge photo to actual size | click to access video files

Comparing Live Settings

Let’s examine how x265 and Beamr 5 fair when used for live encoding of 4K resolution video. When we set Beamr 5 to an equal speed configuration of x265 ‘ultrafast’, Beamr 5 was found to be faster while producing the same or better video quality.

Table 5: Live preset configuration.

Command line example for x265 live (real-time) configuration:

$./x265 – –input BarScene.yuv – –input-res 4096×2160 – –frames 1200 –fps 60 – –preset ultrafast – –keyint 90 – –pools 16 – –bitrate 7000 – –vbv-maxrate 14000 – –vbv-bufsize 112000 –hrd –o x.265

Table 6: Live configuration performance of Beamr 5 vs. x265.

Screen capture 7: Live settings Beamr 5 vs. x265.

4K resolution video ‘Bar Scene’ frame 595, left side is Beamr 5, right side is x265. Beamr 5 is 15% faster and produced better video quality than x265.

click to enlarge photo to actual size | click to access video files

Screen capture 8: Live settings Beamr 5 vs. x265.

4K resolution video ‘Dinner Scene’ frame 528, left side is Beamr 5, right side is x265. Beamr 5 is 15% faster than x265, while both exhibited comparable quality.

click to enlarge photo to actual size | click to access video files

Screen capture 9: Live settings Beamr 5 vs. x265.

4K resolution video ‘Tango’ frame 274, left side is Beamr 5, right side is x265. Beamr 5 is 11% faster with comparable quality, than x265.

click to enlarge photo to actual size | click to access video files

Summary Beamr 5 Technical Advantages

Beamr has 30 granted and 23 pending patents, including a fast motion estimation process which is useful when speed and quality are at competing priority. Beamr 5’s fast motion estimation process is a significant factor in our performance advantage.

Beamr 5 uses a heuristic early-termination process which enables it to reach a targeted quality using less computational resources.

Beamr 5 allows for more possible frame hierarchies (levels) than what is provided by the H.265 standard. When encoding hierarchical B-frames, x265 uses a 2-level B-frame hierarchy. Beamr 5 on the other hand, encodes with a 3-level B-frame hierarchy when encoding seven B frames between P-frames.

x265 begins encoding frames before all reference frames are finished, which limits motion estimation to only the parts of reference frames that are available. When high performance (speed) is needed, x265 encoding quality can be degraded. This provides a serious advantage to Beamr 5 which supports full codec multithreading while x265 uses slices and tiles for parallelism (when WPP is disabled for maximum efficiency).

Beamr 5 achieves better parallelism without the limitations noted above because it is based on utilizing all possible independent encoding tasks inside a single frame. This is called wave-front and it is active even when entropy wave-front is not used. Multithreading in de-blocking and SAO filtering provides additional quality benefits.

Evaluating an encoder is one of the most important jobs for a video encoding engineer and we are proud of the advanced HEVC codec implementation we’ve developed. All information presented may be tested and verified and we invite you to take advantage of the video files using Beamr View to subjectively analyze the results above.

For those interested in Intel specific support, you will want to stay tuned for important speed breakthroughs that we will be showing soon. Get a preview of what was announced at IBC 2017 – Beamr 5 running on the new Intel Xeon Scalable Platinum Processor. Six live 4Kp60 10-bit HDR streams on a dual socket 8180 board.

For more information simply send an email to info@beamr.com and a member of our technical sales team will reach out.

If you would like to learn more about Beamr 5 performance on the Intel Scalable Platinum processor family, check out our benchmark test. CLICK HERE

H.265 HEVC Mobile Video OTT Reduce Bitrate Uncategorized

How to deal with the tension of video on the mobile network – Part 1

Posted on July 28, 2017by Dror Gill

Last week, the Internet erupted in furor over Verizon’s alleged “throttling” of video streaming services over their mobile network. With a quick glance at the headlines, and to the uninitiated, this could be perceived as an example of a wireless company taking their market dominance too far. Most commenters were quick to pontificate calling “interference” by Verizon a violation of net neutrality.

But this article isn’t about the argument for, or against, network neutrality. Instead, let’s examine the tension that exists as a result of the rapid increase in video consumption on mobile devices for the OTT and video streaming industry. Let’s explore why T-Mobile, Verizon, and others that have yet to come forward, feel the need to reduce the size of the video files that are streaming across their networks.

Cisco reports that by 2021, 82% of all Internet traffic will be video, and for the mobile network video is set to explode equally so that by 2022 75% of data flowing over a mobile network will be video according to Ericsson. This increase of video over the mobile network means by 2021, the average user is set to consume a whopping 8.9GB of data every month as reported by BGR. These data points reveal why escalating consumption of video by wireless subscribers is creating tension in the ecosystem.

So what are the wireless operators trying to achieve by reducing the bitrates of video that is being delivered on their network?

Many mobile service operators offer their own entertainment video service packages, which means they are free to deliver the content in the quality that is consistent with their service level positioning. For some, this may be low to medium quality, but most viewers won’t settle for anything short of medium to high quality.

As most mobile networks have internal video distribution customers such as AT&T with DirecTV Now, at the same time, AT&T delivers video for Netflix. Which means, DirecTV Now is free to modify the encoded files to the maximum extent in order to achieve a perfect blend of quality and low bitrate, while for premium services like Netflix, the video packets cannot be touched due to DRM and the widespread adoption of HTTPS encryption. The point is, mobile carriers don’t always control the formats or quality of video that they carry over the network and for this reason, every content owner and video distributor should have an equal interest in pre-packaging (optimizing) their content for the highest quality and smallest file size possible.

As consumers grow more savvy to the difference in video and service quality between content services, many are becoming less willing to compromise. After all, you don’t invest in a top-of-the-line phone with an AMOLED screen to watch blocky low resolution video. Yet, because of the way services deliver content to mobile devices, in some cases, the full quality of the devices’ screen is unable to be realized by the consumer.

We see this point accentuated when a mobile network operator implements technology designed to reduce the resolution, or lower video complexity, in order to achieve a reduced bandwidth target. Attempts are made to make these changes while preserving the original video quality as much as possible, but it stands to reason that if you start with 1080p (full HD) and reduce the resolution to 480p (standard definition), the customer experience will suffer. Currently, the way bandwidth is being reduced on mobile networks is best described as a brute force method. In scenarios where mobile operators force 480p, the bitrate is reduced at the expense of resolution. But is this the best approach? Let’s take a look.

Beamr published a case study with findings from M-GO where our optimization solution helped to reduce buffering events by up to 50%, and improved stream start times by as much as 20%. These are impressive achievements, and indicative of the value of optimizing video for the smallest size possible, provided the original quality is retained.

A recent study “Bit rate and business model” published by Akamai in conjunction with Sensum also supports M-GO and Conviva’s Viewer Experience Report findings. In the Akamai/Sensum study, the human reaction to quality was measured and the researchers found that three out of four participants would stop using a service after even a few re-buffering events.

For the study, viewers were split into two control groups with one group exposed only to a lower resolution (quality) stream that contained at least one stream interruption (re-buffering event). This group was 20% less likely to associate a positive word with the viewing experience as compared to viewers who watched the higher quality full resolution stream that played smoothly without buffering (resolutions displayed were up to 4K). Accordingly, lower quality streams lead to a 16% increase in negative emotions, while higher quality streams led to a 20% increase in emotional engagement.

There are those who claim “you can’t see 4K”, or use phrases like “smarter pixels not more pixels.” With the complexity of the human visual system and its interconnection to our brain, the Akamai study shows that our physiological systems are able to detect differences between higher resolution and lower resolution. These disruptions were validated by changes in the viewers eye movements, breathing patterns, and increased perspiration.

Balancing the needs of the network, video distributor, and consumer.

Consumers expect content at their fingertips, and they also expect the total cost of the content and the service needed to deliver it, to be affordable.
Service providers are driven by the need to deliver higher quality video to increase viewer engagement.
Mobile network operators welcome any application that drives more demand for their product (data) with open arms, yet, need to face the challenge of how to deal with this expanding data which is beginning to outstrip the customers willingness to pay.

Delivering content over the Internet is not free as some assume. Since the streaming video distributor pays the CDN by the size of the package, e.g. gigabytes delivered, they are able to exploit the massive network investments made by mobile operators. Meanwhile, they (or more specifically their end-customers) carry the expectation that the capacity needed to deliver their videos to meet demand, will always be available. Thus, a network operator must invest ahead of revenues with the promise that growth will meet the investment.

All of this can be summed up by this simple statement, “If you don’t take care of the bandwidth, someone else will.”

Video codecs are evolutionary with each progressive codec being more efficient than the last. The current standard is H.264 and though this codec delivers amazing quality with reasonable performance and bitrate reduction, it’s built on a standard that is now fourteen years old. However, as even entry level mobile phones now support 1080p, video encoding engineers are running into an issue with H.264 not able to reach the quality they need below 3 Mbps. In fact, some distributors are pushing their H.264 bitrates lower than 3Mbps for 1080p, but in doing so they must be willing to introduce noticeable artifacts. So the question is, how do we get to 2 Mbps or lower, but with the same quality of 3-4 Mbps, and with the original resolution?

Enter HEVC.

With Apple’s recent announcement to support HEVC across as many as 400 million devices with HW decoding, content owners should be looking seriously to adopt HEVC in order to realize the 40% reduction in bitrate that Apple is reporting, over H.264. But how exactly can HEVC bring relief to an overburdened mobile network?

In the future it can be argued that once HEVC has reached broad adoption, the situation we have today with bitrates being higher than we’d like, will no longer exist. After all, if you could flip a switch and reduce all the video traffic on the network by 40% with a more efficient compression scheme (HEVC), then it’s quite possible that we’ll push the bandwidth crunch out for another 3-5 years.

But this thinking is more related to fairytales and unicorns than real life. For one thing, video encoding workflows and networks do not function like light switches. Not only does it takes time to integrate and test new technology, but a big issue is that video consumption and advanced entertainment experiences, like VR, AR, and 360, will consume the new white space as quickly as it becomes available, bringing us back to where we are today.

Meeting the bandwidth challenge will require us working together.

In the above scenario, there is a shared responsibility on both the distributor and the network to each play their role in guaranteeing that quality remains high while not wasting bits. For those who are wondering, inefficient encoding methods, or dated codecs such as H.264 fall into the “inefficient” category.

The Internet is a shared resource and whether it stays under some modicum of government regulation, or becomes open again, it’s critical for all members of the ecosystem to recognize that the network is not of infinite capacity and those using it to distribute video should respect this by taking the following steps:

Adopt HEVC across all platforms and resolutions. This step alone will yield up to a 40% reduction over your current H.264 bandwidths.
Implement advanced content-adaptive technologies such as Beamr CABR (CABR stands for Content-Adaptive Bitrate) which can enable a further reduction of video bitrates over the 40% that HEVC affords, by an additional 30-50%.
Adopt just in time encoding that can allow for real-time dynamic control of bitrate based on the needs of the viewing device and network conditions. Intel and Beamr have partnered to offer an ultra-high density and low cost HEVC 4K, live 10bit encoding solution using the E3 platform with IRIS PRO P580 graphics accelerator.

In conclusion.

With or without network neutrality, reducing video bandwidth will be a perpetual need for the foreseeable future. Whether to delay capex investment, or to meet competitive pressure on video quality, or simply to increase profitability and decrease opex, the benefits to always delivering the smallest file and stream sizes possible, are easy to model.
The current method of brute forcing lower resolutions, or transcoding to reduced framerate will not be sustainable as consumers are expecting the original experience to be delivered. The technical solutions implemented must deliver high quality and be ready for next generation entertainment experiences. At the same time, if you don’t work to trim the fat from your video files, someone else may do it, and it most certainly will be at the expense of video quality and user experience.
HEVC and Beamr CABR represent the state of the art in high quality video encoding and bitrate reduction (optimization) without compromise.

If you’d like to learn more, keep an eye out for part two in this series, or take a moment to read this relevant article: It’s Unreasonable to Expect ISP’s Alone to Finance OTT Traffic

In the meantime, you can download our VP9 vs. HEVC white paper, learn how to encode content for the future, or contact us at sales@beamr.com to talk further.

H.265 HEVC HEVC/VP9 Uncategorized VP9

Comparing HEVC & VP9 Made Easy

Posted on July 13, 2017by Dror Gill

Apple recently announced their plans to enable HEVC on up to one billion devices with the release of iOS 11 and High Sierra later this year, causing video services to reevaluate their workflows and the codecs they are using. With video codecs in a constant state of ongoing development, it can be hard to know which one is right to choose. But with the ever increasing pressure to reduce bitrates and upgrade quality, video service providers looking for a competitive edge, are examining next generation encoding platforms, namely HEVC and VP9.

To aid in the evaluation process, our software video encoding engineers have compiled a guide that will eliminate the guesswork of comparing HEVC and VP9. This guide provides a qualitative overview of the strengths, weaknesses, and key differences between the HEVC (H.265) and VP9 codec toolsets, including:

Partitioning approaches & block sizes
Variable length coding features
Transform types and sizes
Intra & inter prediction
In-loop filters

Click graphic to download the full white paper.

Content-Adaptive H.265 HEVC WWDC2017

We Celebrate with Cake!

Posted on June 14, 2017by Dror Gill

At Beamr, when we celebrate, we do it with cake!

Today’s very special, and oh so yummy cake celebration, was a recognition of the amazing milestone that we reached on May 31, 2017 as the result of Beamr acquiring Vanguard Video on April 1st, 2016. Our vision for buying Vanguard as a firmly entrenched leader in HEVC video encoding was to combine Beamr’s world class content-adaptive optimization technology with the world’s best HEVC encoder. The results as we demonstrated at NAB 2017, are nothing short of breathtaking.

Can you imagine second screen HD at 1.5Mbps and 4K UHD with HDR at just 10Mbps? With Beamr 5x, and now that WWDC2017 saw Apple enabling HEVC across their devices, the time is now to move to HEVC so your users can enjoy enhanced UX and improved video quality.

Beamr 5x is available for private beta testing, contact us for more information.

Keep an eye out for all our news, because we’ve only just begun. The technology that we have introduced to the video encoding industry has set a new standard for performance and savings, and what the future holds is nothing short of earth shattering.

And yes, precisely 23 seconds after this picture was taken, this cake was unrecognizable!