AOM AV1HEVCThe Video Insiders

Codec Efficiency is in the Eye of the Measurer. [podcast]

Posted on by Dror Gill

When it comes to comparing video codecs, it’s easy to get caught up in the “codec war” mentality. If analyzing and purchasing codecs was as easy as comparing fuel economy in cars, it would undoubtedly take a lot of friction out of codec comparison, but the reality is that it’s not that simple.

In Episode 02, The Video Insiders go head-to-head comparing two of the leading codecs in a three against one standoff over whether AV1 is more efficient than HEVC.

So, which is more efficient?

Listen in to this week’s episode, “Codec Efficiency Is in the Eye of the Measurer,” to find out.

Tune in here or click play on the video below to listen now.

https://youtu.be/ThkoOHuPEvo

Want to join the conversation? Reach out to TheVideoInsiders@beamr.com.

TRANSCRIPTION (lightly edited to improve readability only)

Mark Donnigan: 00:41 Hi everyone I am Mark Donnigan and I want to welcome you to episode two of the Video Insiders.

Dror Gill: 00:48 And I am Dror Gill. Hi there.

Mark Donnigan: 00:50 In every episode of the Video Insiders we bring the latest inside information about what’s happening in the video technology industry from encoding, to packaging, to delivery, and playback, and even the business behind the video business. Every aspect of the video industry is covered in detail on the Video Insiders podcast.

Dror Gill: 01:11 Oh yeah, we usually do cover everything from pixels, to blocks, to microblocks, to frames, to sequences. We go all the way up and down the video delivery chain and highlight the most important things you should know before you send any video bits over the wire.

Mark Donnigan: 01:28 In our first episode we talked about a very hot topic which asked, “Hasn’t this kind of been worn out?” The whole HEVC, AV1 discussion. But I think it was very interesting. I sure enjoyed the talk. What about you Dror?

Dror Gill: 01:47 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I sure did. It was great talking about the two leading codecs. I don’t want to say the word, codec war.

Mark Donnigan: 01:58 No, no, we don’t believe in codec wars.

Dror Gill: 01:59 We believe in codec peace.

Mark Donnigan: 02:00 Yeah, that’s true. Why is it so complicated to compare video codecs? Why can’t it be as simple as fuel economy of cars, this one gets 20 miles per gallon and that one gets 30 and then I make a decision based on that.

Dror Gill: 02:15 I wish it was that simple with video codecs. In video compression you have so many parameters to consider. You have the encoding tools, tools are grouped into what’s called profiles and levels, or as AV1 calls them “experiments.”

Mark Donnigan: 02:31 Experiments, mm-hmm…

Dror Gill: 02:35 When you compare the codecs which profiles and levels do you use. What rate control method? Which specific parameters do you set for each codec? And each codec can have hundreds, and hundreds of parameters. Then there is the question of implementation. Which software implementation of the codec do you use? Some implementations are reference implementations that are used for research, and others are highly performance optimized commercial implementations. Which one do you select for the test? And then, which operating system, what hardware do you run on, and obviously what test content? Because encoding two people talking, or encoding an action scene for a movie, is completely different.

Dror Gill: 03:13 Finally, when you come to evaluate your video, what quality measure do you use? There’re various objective quality measures and some people use actual human viewers and they assesses subjective quality of the video. On that front also, there’re many possibilities that you need to choose from.

Mark Donnigan: 03:32 Yeah, so many questions and no wonder the answers are not so clear. I was quite surprised when I recently read three different technical articles published at IBC actually, effectively comparing AV1 versus HEVC and I can assume that each of the authors did their research independently. What was surprising was they came to the exact same conclusion, AV1 has the same compression efficiency as HEVC. This is surprising because some other studies and one in particular (I think we’ll talk about) out there says the contrary. So can you explain what this means exactly, Dror.

Dror Gill: 04:16 By saying that they have the same compression efficiency, this means that they can reach the same quality at the same bitrate or the other way round. You need the same bitrate to reach that same quality. If you need for example, two and a half megabits per second to encode an HD video file using HEVC at a certain quality, then with AV1 you would need roughly the same bitrate to reach that same quality and this means that AV1 and HEVC provide the same compression level. In other words, this means that AV1 does not have any technical advantage over HEVC because it has the same compression efficiency. Of course that’s if we put aside all the loyalty issues but we discussed that last time. Right?

Mark Donnigan: 04:56 That’s right. The guys who wrote the three papers that I’m referencing are really top experts in the field. It’s not seminar work done by a student, not to downplay those papers, but the point is these are professionals. One was written by the BBC in cooperation with the Multimedia and Vision Group at the Queen Mary University of London. I think nobody is going to say that the BBC doesn’t know a thing or two about video. The second was written by Ateme, and the third by Harmonic, leading vendors.

Mark Donnigan: 05:29 I actually pulled out a couple of phrases from each that I’d like to quote. First the BBC and Queen Mary University, here is a conclusion that they wrote, “The results obtained show in general a similar performance between AV1 and the reference HEVC both objectively and subjectively.” Which is interesting because they did take the time to both do the visual assessment as well as use a quality measure.

Mark Donnigan: 06:01 Ateme said, “Results demonstrate AV1 to have equivalent performance to HEVC in terms of both objective and subjective video quality test results.”

Dror Gill: 06:10 Yeah, very similar.

Mark Donnigan: 06:16 And then here is what Harmonic said, “The findings are that AV1 is not more advantageous today than HEVC on the compression side and much more complex to encode than HEVC.” What do you make of this?

Dror Gill: 06:32 I don’t know. It sounds pretty bad to me, even two of those papers also analyzed subjective quality so they used actual human viewers to check out the quality. But Mark what if I told you that researchers from the University of Klagenfurt in Austria together with Bitmovin published a paper which showed completely different results. What would you say about that?

Mark Donnigan: 06:57 Tell me more.

Dror Gill: 06:58 Last month in Athens I was the ICIP conference that’s the IEEE International Conference on Image Compression and Image Processing. There was this paper presented by this University in Austria with Bitmovin and their conclusion was, let me quote, “When using weighted PSNR, AV1 performs consistently better for bit rate compared to AVC, HEVC, and VP9.” So they claim AV1 is better than three codecs but specifically it’s better than HEVC. And then they have a table in their article that compares AV1 to HEVC for six different video clips. The table shows that with AV1 you get up to 25% lower bitrate at the same quality than HEVC.

Dror Gill: 07:43 I was sitting there in Athens last month when they presented this and I was shocked.

Mark Donnigan: 07:50 What are the chances that three independent papers are wrong and only this paper got it right? And by the way, the point here is not three against one because presumably there’re some other papers. I’m guessing other research floating around that might side with Bitmovin. The point is that three companies who no one is going to say that any of them are not experts and not highly qualified to do a video assessment, came up with such a different result. Tell us what you think is going on here?

Dror Gill: 08:28 I was thinking the same thing. How can that be. During the presentation I asked one of the authors who presented the paper a few questions and it turned out that they made some very questionable decisions in all of that sea of possibility that I talked about before. Decisions related to coding tools, codec parameters, and quality measures.

Dror Gill: 08:51 First of all, in this paper they didn’t show any results of subjective viewing. Only the objective metrics. Now we all know that you should always your eyes, right?

Mark Donnigan: 09:03 That’s right.

Dror Gill: 09:04 Objective metrics, nice numbers, but obviously you need to view the video because that’s how the actual viewers are going to assess the (video) quality. The second thing is that they only used the single objective metric and this was PSNR. PSNR, it stands for peak signal-to-noise ratio and basically this measure is a weighted average of the difference in peaks between pixel values of the two images.

Dror Gill: 09:30 Now, we’re Video Insiders, but even if you’re not an insider you know that PSNR is not a very good quality measure because it does not correlate very well with human vision. This is the measure that they choose to look at but what was most surprising is that there is a flag in the HEVC open source encoder which they used that if chosen, the result is improved PNSR. What it does, it turns off some psycho-visual optimizations which make the video look better but reduce the PSNR, and that’s turned on by default. So you would expect that they’re measuring PSNR they would turn that flag on so you would get higher PSNR. Well, they didn’t. They didn’t turn the flag on!

Mark Donnigan: 10:13 Amazing.

Dror Gill: 10:17 Finally, even then AV1 is much slower than HEVC, and they also reported in this data that it was much, much slower than HEVC but still they did not use the slowest encoding standing of HEVC, which would provide the best quality. There’s always a trade off between performance and quality. The more tools you employ the better quality you can squeeze out of the video, of course that takes you more CPU cycles but they used for HEVC, the third slowest setting which means this is the third best quality you can get with that codec and not the very best quality. When you handicap an HEVC encoder in this way, it’s not surprising that you get such poor results.

Dror Gill: 11:02 I think based on all these points everybody can understand why the results of this comparison were quite different than all of the other comparison that were published a month earlier at IBC (by Ateme, BBC, Harmonic).

Mark Donnigan: 11:13 It’s interesting.

Mark Donnigan: 11:14 Another critical topic that we have to cover is performance. If you measure the CPU performance on encoding time of AV1, I believe that it’s pretty universally understood that you are going to find it currently is a hundred times slower than HEVC. Is that correct?

Dror Gill: 11:32 Yeah, that’s right. Typically, you measure the performance of an encoder and FPS which is frames per second. For HEVC it’s common to measure an FPM which is frames per minute.

Mark Donnigan: 11:42 Frames per minute, (more like) frames per hour, FPH.

Dror Gill: 11:45 A year and a half ago or a year ago when there were very initial implementation, it was really FPD or FPH, Frames per hour or per day and you really needed to have a lot of patience, but now after they’ve done some work it’s only a hundred times slower than HEVC.

Mark Donnigan: 12:02 Yeah, that’s pretty good. They’re getting there. But some people say that the open source implementation of AV1 I believe it’s AOM ENC.

Dror Gill: 12:11 Yeah, AOM ENC.

Mark Donnigan: 12:16 ENC exactly has not been optimized for performance at all. One thing I like about speed is either your encoder produces X number of frames per second or per minute, or it doesn’t. It’s really simple. Here is my next question for you. Proponents of AV1 are saying, “well it’s true it’s slow but it hasn’t been optimized, the open source implementation,” which is to imply that there’s a lot of room (for improvement) and that we’re just getting started, “don’t worry we’ll close the gap.” But if you look at the code, and by the way I may be a marketing guy but my formal education is computer science.

Mark Donnigan: 13:03 You can see it already includes performance optimizations. I mean eptimizations like MMX, SSE, there’s AVX instructions, there’s CPU optimization, there’s multithreading. It seems like they’re already trying to make this thing go faster. So how are they going to close this a hundred X (time) gap?

Dror Gill: 13:22 I don’t think they can. I mean a hundred X, that’s a lot and you know even the AV1 guys they even admit that they won’t be able to close the gap. I talked to a few senior people who’re involved in the Alliance for Open Media and even they told me that they expect AV1 to five to 10 times more complex than HEVC at the end of the road. In two to three years after all optimization are done, it’s still going to be more complex than HEVC.

Dror Gill: 13:55 Now, if you ask me why it’s so complex I’ll tell you my opinion. Okay, this is my personal opinion. I think it’s because they invested a lot of effort in side stepping the patents (HEVC).

Mark Donnigan: 14:07 Good point. I agree.

Dror Gill: 14:07 They need to get that compression efficiency which is the same as HEVC but they need to use algorithms that are not patented. They have methods that use much more CPU resources than the original patent algorithms to reach the same results. You can call it kind of brute force implementation of the same thing to avoid the patent issue. That’s my personal opinion, but the end result I think is clear, it’s going to be five to 10 times slower than HEVC. It has the same compression efficiency so I think it’s quite questionable. This whole notion of using AV1 to get better results.

Mark Donnigan: 14:45 Absolutely. If you can encode let’s say on a single computer with HEVC a full ABR stack, this is what people want to do. But here we’re talking speeds that are so slow let’s just try and do (encode) one stream. Literally what you’re saying is you’ll need five to 10 computers to do the same encode with AV1. I mean, that’s just not viable. It doesn’t make sense to me.

Dror Gill: 15:14 Yeah, why would you invest so much encoding into getting the same results. If you look at another aspect of this, let’s talk about hardware encode. Companies that have large data centers, companies that are encoding vast amount of video content are not looking into moving from the traditional software encoding and CPUs and GPUs, to dedicated hardware. We’re hearing talks about FPGAs even ASICs … by the way this is a very interesting trend in itself that we’ll probably cover in one of the next episodes. But in the context of AV1, imagine a chip that is five to 10 times larger than an HEVC chip and which is the same complexity efficiency. The question I ask again is why? Why would anybody design such a chip, and why would anybody use it when HEVC is available today? It’s much easier to encode, royalty issues have been practically solved so you know?

Mark Donnigan: 16:06 Yeah, it’s a big mystery for sure. One thing I can say is the Alliance for Open Media has done a great service to HEVC by pushing the patent holders to finalize their licensing terms … and ultimately make them much more rational shall we say?

Dror Gill: 16:23 Yeah.

Mark Donnigan: 16:25 Let me say that as we’re an HEVC vendor and speaking on behalf of others (in the industry), we’re forever thankful to the Alliance for Open Media.

Dror Gill: 16:36 Definitely, without the push from AOM and the development of AV1 we would be stuck with HEVC royalty issue until this day.

Mark Donnigan: 16:44 That was not a pretty situation a few years back, wow!

Dror Gill: 16:48 No, no, but as we said in the last episode we have a “happy ending” now. (reference to episode 1)

Mark Donnigan: 16:52 That’s right.

Dror Gill: 16:52 Billions of devices support HEVC and royalty issues are pretty much solved, so that’s great. I think we’ve covered HEVC and AV1 pretty thoroughly in two episodes but what about the other codecs? There’s VP9, you could call that the predecessor of AV1, and then there’s VVC, which is the successor of HEVC. It’s the next codec developed by MPEG. Okay, VP9 and VVC I guess we have a topic for our next episode, right?

Mark Donnigan: 17:21 It’s going to be awesome.

Narrator: 17:23 Thank you for listening to the Video Insider podcast a production of Beamr limited. To begin using Beamr codecs today go to beamr.com/free to receive up to 100 hours of no cost HEVC and H.264 transcoding every month.

AOM AV1HEVCThe Video Insiders

Will the Story End a Tragedy or Triumph? [podcast]

Posted on by Dror Gill

If you spend the majority of your time pondering hot topics in the streaming media space, you’re not alone.

Our team of image scientists and video encoding engineers are equally passionate about all things video related. Which means, not surprisingly, we spend our days discussing everything from video encoding, playback, workflow architecture, codecs, compression techniques, and more.

But as we looked around the industry for sources of information on these topics we noticed a dearth of information, which is why we thought to ourselves, “let’s do something about this,” and launched The Video Insiders podcast.

Hosted by our CTO Dror Gill and me, Mark Donnigan, the show takes on a refreshingly non-partisan tone as the purpose is to equip the industry with information that is free of bias, spin, and agenda.

Join us as we dive into today’s top of mind discussions: compression, codecs, encoding, transcoding, and video workflows. We cover it all, and we do hope that you find the information valuable as you contribute to the industry in your role, whether it be engineering, operations, or business.

Tune in to Episode 01: Will the AV1/HEVC Story End a Tragedy or Triumph? hor watch below.

https://youtu.be/Xl42sDfDXqU

TRANSCRIPT

(lightly edited for clarity)

INTRODUCTION MONOLOGUE MARK & DROR

Mark Donnigan: 00:15 Hi everyone, my name is Mark Donnigan and I am super excited to be opening this first episode of The Video Insiders. But before I say anything more I want to introduce you to my esteemed co-host, Dror Gill. Welcome Dror.

Dror Gill: 00:31 Thank you Mark. You know if you could do some e-motion estimation on me, you would also find out that I’m pretty excited to be opening this podcast and I think it’s gonna be awesome. Mark maybe we should tell everyone what they’re getting themselves into.

Mark Donnigan: 00:45 So, we are the Video Insiders and in every episode we will bring the latest inside information about what’s happening in the video technology industry from codecs both past, present and maybe even some not invented yet, you know. I don’t know, maybe we’ll invent one. What do you think Dror?

Dror Gill: 01:04 Yeah, yeah, maybe.

Mark Donnigan: 01:05 And obviously we’ll cover video in coding, trans coding and you know I’m a little bit more of a business guy. You’re a serious technologist and our listeners will get to know you but at the end of the day business drives this. So, we’ll cover business and I can’t think of too much that’s really off limits, right?

Dror Gill: 01:27 No, no, we’re gonna talk about everything, everything related to video. But first Mark I have to tell the listeners a small secret about you.

Mark Donnigan: 01:36 Oh no.

Dror Gill: 01:37 Those who know you best probably have been privileged to pound the keyboard.

Mark Donnigan: 01:43 Pound the keyboard, hmm, well you know when I, you know my new MacBook, you know it is pretty noisy. Man, what’s up with that keyboard, wow.

Dror Gill: 01:55 Not that kind of keyboard, I just happened to know that you’ve studied some classical piano performance and jazz in college, right?

Mark Donnigan: 02:03 Oo, this is true. Not too many people know that about me. That’s true, that is true. But it was a long time ago. But while we’re on the subject of music, you know, discussing beta release schedules kinda has a dual meaning for you, doesn’t it Dror?

Dror Gill: 02:21 Oh, yeah, yeah. You got me there. So, yeah, Beta is the name of my rock band. I’m a land singer of a rock band called Beta.

Mark Donnigan: 02:30 That’s super cool.

Dror Gill: 02:31 Yeah, we do some gigs, we’ve recorded a few tracks. So, when you discuss a beta schedule with me that could be just our tour schedule and not our milestones.

Mark Donnigan: 02:42 Well, there you have it. You know, look if we do our jobs this podcast just may rock our listeners video world, right?

Dror Gill: 02:50 Yeah, yeah, for sure. And if not, at least it will be the number one destination for their latest news and analysis about video compression, protection, monetization, applications, you know we’re gonna talk about all those buzzy words. Buzz words such as HDR, UHD, HEVC, AV1.

START OF DISCUSSION

HEVC triumph?

Mark Donnigan: 03:13 That’s pretty buzzy. That’s pretty buzzy. Well, hey HEVC and AV1, I’m glad you brought those codecs up, because some may say the topic is really been run into the ground. So, what do you think Dror?

Dror Gill: 03:26 I think it’s still a great topic, you know, because it has all the elements of a good story. It’s like a true hero’s journey. You know, you might say it has Hollywood glamour, has some tragedy, has its ups and downs and finally does have a happy ending.

Mark Donnigan: 03:42 Well, happy endings are good, so to kick this off for our listeners who don’t have a deep technical background. What is HEVC?

Dror Gill: 03:51 HEVC is the latest video standard. It was developed by the MPEG committee. MPEG is short for Motion Pictures Experts Group. Notice the motion pictures, yes they don’t call it video. We’re still in like the old days of when cinema just started. It’s not a video it’s just a bunch of moving pictures.

Mark Donnigan: 04:12 That’s funny isn’t it?

Dror Gill: 04:13 One after the other in a series so that creates an illusion of movements.

Mark Donnigan: 04:17 It’s moving pictures.

Dror Gill: 04:19 So, MPEG developed a lot of video standards. All the MPEG standards, there was MPEG 1, MPEG 2, MPEG 4 and then MPEG 4 AVC. Which some people know by the name H.264. And finally MPEG HEVC, which some people call H.265. But don’t do that Mark. Don’t call it H.265 because Leonardo might ban you.

Mark Donnigan: 04:43 Now, wait a second, how will Leonardo DiCaprio ban me?

Dror Gill: 04:46 Oh no, not Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark. You’re taking the Hollywood reference a bit too far. I’m talking about Leonardo Chiariglione. He’s been the founder and chairman of the MPEG committee for the past 30 years.

Mark Donnigan: 04:59 Ah, that Leonardo.

Dror Gill: 05:03 You know, many people call him the father of MPEG because you know he founded the committee and he’s been leading it. So, I heard a rumor that if he used the term H.265 instead of HEVC than he might ban you from the MPEG mail reflectors forever. So, you know, be careful.

Mark Donnigan: 05:19 Well, I mean pretty successful stuff that the MPEG committee has developed. MPEG 2, you know it’s used in all digital cable, satellite, terrestrial broadcast, DVD. MPEG 4, Blu-ray discs. Everything on the internet is streamed with MPEG 4.

Dror Gill: 05:39 Yeah with MPEG 4 AVC, AVC.

Mark Donnigan: 05:42 Yeah, AVC. That’s right. Thanks for correcting me there.

Mark Donnigan: 05:47 So, I heard that MPEG even won an Emmy award I think two times right?

Dror Gill: 05:52 Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Mark Donnigan: 05:53 Now, can you imagine the Leonardo that I’m thinking of and all the engineering geeks from MPEG standing there on the same stage as the other Leonardo from the MPEG committee. That’s really amazing. That’s pretty cool actually.

Dror Gill: 06:09 Yeah, yeah it is. You know, what’s even more amazing? Every generation of the standard they essentially double the compression efficiency. So, for example with HEVC you can get the same quality as H.264 but at half the bit rate. Now, I’m not saying you can do this all the time and not for every content and it’s not true for every resolution. I have to be very careful here cause you know, some people in the industry spread information that is not 100 percent accurate.

Dror Gill: 06:39 And sometimes it is possible that we will discuss such occasions on a podcast. But I’d like to be on the safe side so let’s say between 40 and 50 percent, depending on the resolution. That’s the improvement in compression efficiency would get with HEVC.

Mark Donnigan: 06:57 Sure, which is really great and pretty amazing. So, why isn’t everyone using HEVC instead of H.264? I mean, with video occupying, I mean the studies keep on, this number goes up seems like by the month by 70 percent the internet is video traffic. Netflix is like 15 percent of bandwidth consumed at peak viewing time. That’s staggering if you think about it. I would think everyone would just want to switch to HEVC and either enjoy the savings or be able to double their capacity. What’s going on there?

Dror Gill: 07:31 Yeah, yeah, that would have been really what you would expect with HEVC being much more efficient than H.264 but this is really where the tragedy part of our story comes in. There’s a lot of sophisticated algorithms which actually enable this great compression efficiency and many companies would jointly created the HEVC standard. They obviously have patents on all of these technologies that they developed. So, with H.264, the situation was simple. There were companies that developed algorithms, they had patents but there was a single patent pool that was organized by a company called MPEG LA. And you could just license all the patents very easily in this one stop shop. But with HEVC the problem was that the patent holders joined three different pool and some of them didn’t join any pools. So, you act of this unreasonable licensing terms which were published by one of the patent pools initially and their half of the industry was in complete chaos regarding HEVC licensing.

Mark Donnigan: 08:40 Wow, sounds pretty bad. Leonard Chiariglione  wrote a pretty famous blog post called, ‘The Crisis, the Causes and it’s Solutions’, if I remember correctly.

Dror Gill: 08:55 Yes. It was very sad and he said that from his point of view the MPEG way has reached an end. They developed this great technology and then nobody uses them because of licensing issues. So, that was the peak of the tragedy but luckily for us and I think for the whole industry, finally, the patent holders came to their senses. And now everything is much more clear. I mean the two major patent’s pools which are MPEG LA and HEVC Advance, both of them are not charging any royalties for content.

Mark Donnigan: 09:29 That’s amazing.

Dror Gill: 09:30 Yeah, yeah. That’s really good news for all the broadcasters.

Mark Donnigan: 09:33 Great news. Yeah.

Dror Gill: 09:34 And content providers around the industry and the third one Velos Media. They haven’t officially announced their licensing terms but everybody’s expecting them also to be reasonable and I’ve heard some things off the record that they’re also not going to charge for content. I mean, they don’t want to cut the branch they’re sitting on. If they’re unreasonable then nobody will license it and they get no money. So, I think basically where we are today you can say that HEVC patent world, these are mostly paid by the vendor of devices such as mobile phones and TVs. All those companies will put chips that support HEVC decoding and the devices and I understand the, Mark, that many of them are already supporting HEVC, right? A lot of devices out there.

Mark Donnigan: 10:18 You know earlier this year Beamr actually sponsored an industry survey which Tim Siglin a contributor to Streaming Media helped us with and also Streaming Media promoted it and helped put it together. The findings were really positive. This was completely a non partisan, fair and balanced survey. 66 percent of those that responded of which was a very high percentage of engineers by the way, more than 400. So, these are industry professionals – reported that HEVC was already in production. So, the reality is that though in some circles there still maybe a little bit of FUD. You know, that’s fear, uncertainty and doubt. The fact is is that more than half the industry has HEVC encoding pipelines running or they’re in the implementation stage. These things don’t happen overnight, so in some cases maybe they’re not encoding HEVC content yet but they will be. It’s a foregone conclusion.

Mark Donnigan: 11:33 77 percent so more than three out of four said HEVC was a very viable replacement for H.264. That’s obviously good news but if we’re making files that can’t be played then I suppose you could file this under the fake news category.

Dror Gill: 11:49 Yeah, if you encode the files somebody has to play them.

Mark Donnigan: 11:53 Exactly. And we’re gonna get to that when we talk about AV1, but when we look at the situation for device support it’s a little bit hard to get the exact numbers but industry seems to be kinda gathering around two billion devices is where most people, you know nod their head and say yes, we believe that number. That’s two billion today that support HEVC in hardware. So, if we think about, first of all it’s a massive number right? But you think about iPhones. Everything from the 6S forward supports HEVC and some markets iPhone penetration is way over 50 percent. And then when you factor in Samsung like the S8, S9, Note 8, Note 9, Galaxy Tab S3. I mean phones from LG, phones from Sony. You look at Macs, you look at PCs especially if they have the Intel Skylake or the Kaby Lake chips. Every 4K TV sold today, I mean I could go on and on.

Mark Donnigan: 12:54 Roku boxes, the new Apple TV, that is the Apple TV 4K. Chromecast even, Amazon Fire TV. So, all of those support HEVC. We heard from a very well placed industry insider that one MSO recently discovered of their users which number tens of millions, (that) more than 50 percent of their customers had at least one device in the home that supported HEVC. Which is very, encouraging.

Dror Gill: 13:32 Yeah, it’s very encouraging. It means that HEVC support is out there. I mean two billion devices, that’s a really large number. So, if you look at it, the situation with HEVC I would say it’s pretty clear. I mean, it’s half the bit rate of H.264 AVC. Royalty issues have mostly been solved, a few billion devices supported in hardware. So, there it is Mark. I think that’s the happy ending I was looking for. So, okay, that’s HEVC, where are we with AV1?

AV1 tragedy?

Mark Donnigan: 14:04 That’s a good question. You know, it’s unclear at the moment. Look, we are definitely fair and balanced here on the Video Insiders so we don’t present things from an agenda. First of all AV1’s open source, right? It is a supposedly a royalty free codec. It’s been developed by a extremely strong group of companies. Companies that if anybody can pull this off it’s Google, it’s Netflix, it’s Facebook, it’s Intel, it’s Microsoft, it’s Apple and there are others. These people are our friends and they’re good, they can build a codec. They could do this. They set out to develop the AV1 codec really in response to the royalty issue. You know, you might get different responses, I haven’t really gone around and asked privately any of these individual companies. But I’m guessing that off the record most would say yeah, if HEVC Advance had been rational, the Alliance for Open Media wouldn’t have been needed and AV1 wouldn’t exist and things would be more clear.

Dror Gill: 15:11 Right, and I understand they want to develop a royalty free codec but I think I heard you say “supposedly royalty free.” Cause I thought AV1 was royalty free, I mean look what it says here. I’m on the AOM website, I’m reading from the website, it says, “Collaborative effort to offer open royalty free and interoperable solutions for the next generation of media delivery.” So, it says royalty free, doesn’t it? I mean, can it be more clearer than that?

Mark Donnigan: 15:36 You can challenge me on that but it’s not that simple. Here’s the deal, the members of the Alliance for Open Media all agreed to contribute their own IP to the AV1 standard and not charge royalties for it, but it’s possible. Again, I’m saying “possible”, I’m not a lawyer, we’re not giving any legal advice so I wanna be careful, but it is possible that other parties who are not members of the Alliance for Open Media could have IP claims or at least could attempt to assert IP claims and to charge royalties on the codec. Now, alliance for open media, AOM, has set up a fund to indemnify licensees, or so I’ve heard. At the end of the day there’s just a lot of questions that don’t have answers. It’s one thing when it’s, you know, engineers sitting around at an industry conference or on a panel having a debate and discussion. It’s a whole different thing when a fortune 50 or a fortune 25 media company who could be facing hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of fines or levees or whatever. You just can’t sort of sweep this stuff under the rug.

Mark Donnigan: 16:56 I think unfortunately that’s kinda what is happening a little bit in my opinion.

Dror Gill: 17:03 At the end of the day I think we need to encourage our listeners to do their own due diligence, you know, because in some industry conferences you can be led to believe the situation is very secure but really nobody is indemnifying you here. So, you really need to be careful. Anyway, on the device side Mark, how many devices support AV1 in hardware?

Mark Donnigan: 17:24 Yeah, so I’m glad you asked, and you know this is what my background is in, consumer electronics. I have a lot of experience there. We get into this situation where it’s easy to sit around and talk about creating files with these new exciting codecs but people kind of forget that VLC is not a viable solution to play back. I’ve been doing some research though and I actually was able to connect via email and in some cases have voice conversations with the SOC vendors, that is the system-on-the-chip vendors who are the ones at the end of the day that have to be convinced to integrate AV1 decode into their silicon.

Mark Donnigan: 18:25 But you know it’s these SOC vendors that at the end of the day is where I’m gonna get the real information. I heard what I anticipated to hear that obviously support today is zero. I heard varying degrees of responses such as we’re thinking about it. It’s getting onto the road map to a slightly more optimistic where some people said in 24 months we’ll have it, maybe sooner. But you should anticipate two years. And then on the other side I got the usual hey look, you know, when there’s a business case that is when I can’t sell a chip because it doesn’t have AV1, that’s when we’ll support it. You know the situation is really this, I am very confident again because the companies behind AV1 that somewhere in 2020 – It’s just not even possible to complete the engineering cycles, the fab cycles for the silicon any sooner than really the end of 2020. So, we’re really talking 24 months, we’re recording this podcast on the last day of October, October 31st, 2018. I anticipate that Christmas season 2020 there will be an (AV1) device.

Mark Donnigan: 19:44 Will it be a Roku box? Will it be a TV? Will it be a game console? Or even just some new product all together, I don’t know.

Dror Gill: 19:53 Maybe an Android phone?

Mark Donnigan: 19:54 Maybe an Android phone, exactly. There will be an AV1 device and there’s no doubt that certain folks that are incented for AV1 to succeed will write articles saying that the world is about to flip. At the end of the day one device, a device does not build an ecosystem. It takes two billion devices that are in real consumer’s hands.

Dror Gill: 20:19 Right.

Mark Donnigan: 20:20 You know, that somebody doesn’t even have to download an app or install something, they just turn it on and it just works. And that we are years and years and years away.

Dror Gill: 20:33 Yeah, I think I agree with you. It will take time until the chips will come out and then tested and devices will come out. So, I’m very bullish about HEVC, I think the message for the industry now is very clear. HEVC is happening today and it’s here to stay.

Mark Donnigan: 21:06 Well let’s bring this to a close. It’s been an awesome discussion about how to compare HEVC and AV1.

Dror Gill: 21:13 Well, comparing codecs that’s a pretty big question and you never get the same answer. It really depends on who you ask so it’s a really interesting topic, but it seems like our time is up so how about we discuss that in our next episode?

Mark Donnigan: 21:29 I want to thank everyone for listening to The Video Insiders’ podcast. This is a production of Beamr Imaging Limited. Please subscribe on iTunes and we will be expanding to other platforms shortly. If you’d like to try out Beamr codecs in your lab or production environment we’re giving away up to 100 hours of HEVC and H.264 encoding every month. Go to https://beamr.com/free to get started immediately.

If you would like to join the discussion as a guest, send an email to thevideoinsiders@beamr.com with a suggested topic that you would like to share.

Video EncodingVirtualized Workflows

Why Beamr Developed a Transcoder

Posted on by Dror Gill

Update 4/4/18:

Since the original publishing of this post, we’ve built a product page for the Beamr Transcoder VOD which may be viewed HERE.

Read Press Release.

The news of Beamr building a transcoder is spreading fast. Many are applauding the move and have expressed interest in adopting – but some may be wondering why a pioneering codec technology company feels the need to build a transcoder? Well, here’s the story.

Beamr was founded on a simple but technically complex idea that there are opportunities to deliver massive value to the video streaming and distribution ecosystem by guaranteeing the smallest video file and stream size possible without compromising video quality.

With the introduction of Beamr Video (now Beamr Optimizer), we proved that we could deliver an additional bitrate savings of up to 50% at the same quality. An incredible feat acknowledged by well-known streaming services and tier-one studios in Hollywood who adopted the technology for use in workflows including Blu-ray disc authoring which represents the highest pinnacle of direct-to-consumer quality.

By incorporating our perceptually driven optimization process (content-adaptive) into the codec, we enable MSO’s and streaming video delivery services to meet their objective of not delivering a single bit more than needed to represent the absolute quality they desire to transmit. This led us to acquire Vanguard Video in April 2016, a company providing codec engineering and software development services for many of the best-known video encoder OEM’s and streaming services. Now with our best-in-class codec, combined with our highly patented and well established perceptual optimization technology, we have the most advanced HEVC video codec in the market: Beamr 5x.

As a video codec does not function standalone outside of a lab environment, all Beamr Codec SDKs work inside the framework of FFmpeg through our plug-in interface. Through the development of our FFmpeg plug-in and as we surveyed the needs of our Telecom and MSO customers, it became clear that FFmpeg could not meet their requirements for industry-standard integration points such as SCTE-35 ad insertion.

What modern video services need in a transcoder.

To deliver uncompromising performance and system integration that meets our customer’s expectations, we built a transcoder that can enable new video workflow architectures with a value-added and performance-oriented engineering philosophy. The Beamr Transcoder is designed to work seamlessly in virtualized video encoding workflows and provides a full transcoding solution which includes Beamr codec SDKs: Beamr 4, Beamr 5, and Beamr 5x.

The first thing we recognized after talking with customers about what they were looking for in a transcoder is that the days of the monolithic black box “workflow solution” that includes content management, transcoding, packaging, DRM, etc. were over.

Customers were unanimous in reporting that they are tired of being held hostage by vendors.

Everyone said that they need a flexible media processing framework to fulfill the requirements of their video encoding service today and in the future.

We took this feedback as inspiration and adopted a critical design philosophy. The transcoder must satisfy the functional framework requirements to work in today’s containerized virtual computing and cloud environments while connecting to complementary solutions from any vendor.

Why FFmpeg isn’t enough.

A major performance advantage with Beamr codec SDKs is our multi-bitrate encoding capability. With multi-bitrate encoding, the SDK can share analysis information from the highest quality tier to the lowest bitrate tiers of the same picture size (resolution). This feature offers significant CPU and performance efficiencies, which allows the quality level to be dialed up for a given job, in a specified turnaround (processing) time. For anyone generating ABR profile stacks, Beamr’s multi-bitrate functionality is a game changer.

Today’s transcoder is a video processing framework that supports video codecs and the associated processing required for audio, metadata, etc. The performance advantages of Beamr’s H.264 and HEVC codec SDKs which ship inside the Beamr Transcoder start with much better parallelism (tiled encoding). Additionally, Beamr codec SDKs enable highly efficient CPU utilization on a many-core server and include better overall thread pool management.  

Over the years as OTT workflows developed, many video distributors found FFmpeg as a media processing framework a good solution, but in time and as technical requirements and compatibility needs increased it has become less viable. FFmpeg is flexible, with many libraries and filters supporting container files and audio/video codecs. It also works with any video transformation during the transcoding process (decode – transform – encode): scaling function, frame rate conversion, color space conversion, bit depth conversion, filtering (noise reduction), etc.  

Because the libraries and filters were developed separately, to make everything work in every combination needed, each filter must be run sequentially, passing the resulting uncompressed video frame to the next filter after it is ready. When the first processing step is complete, and the pixels or data needed for the next step are in the memory cache of the processor, it is more efficient to perform the following processing step immediately, as a tightly synchronized operation, all without saving the intermediate results to system memory, or disk. FFmpeg was developed asynchronously by hundreds and thousands of contributors, meaning this operational structure was not possible to build outside of a closely coordinated product roadmap, which by definition is lacking in open source projects.

Beamr Transcoder was built using a single thread pool that runs all processing tasks easily while outperforming FFmpeg as a media processing framework that runs multiple libraries with their own separate thread pool’s.

How we approached development of the Beamr Transcoder.

The Beamr Transcoder is lightweight, flexible, and not loaded down with legacy bloat. It may not meet a long laundry list of supported technologies, but, as service providers and OTT streaming services are shedding their legacy requirements in favor of lightweight, agile solutions that run 100% in software spanning virtualized environments, this is an advantage to the product. Designed for today’s video workflows, the Beamr Transcoder can scale across on-prem, public, private, or hybrid cloud infrastructures.

The heart of this highly efficient and flexible transcoder is an engine that was developed in native C++ to run on Linux while being highly scalable across public clouds such as AWS using Docker containers. 

 

Beamr Transcoder includes Beamr H.264 and HEVC codec SDKs

Beamr Transcoder VOD 1.0 features overview.

Beamr Transcoder is finely tuned and automatically allocates the optimal number of threads to the video encoding function, reserving the minimum needed for decoding, pipeline management, and network function control. Following is a summary of the critical capabilities of the first version of Beamr Transcoder VOD. (Beamr Transcoder Live will ship later in 2018)

– Containers: ES, TS, MP4, MOV

– Video Decoding: MPEG-2, ProRes, H.264, HEVC

– Video Encoding: H.264 (Beamr 4), HEVC (Beamr 5, Beamr 5x)

– Audio Encoding/Decoding: MP3, AAC, HE-AAC, HE-AAC+, AC-3, E-AC-3, AC-4

– 8, 10 and 12-bit color with 4:2:0/4:2:2

– Supports high resolution, high frame rate (HFR) up to 8Kp120

– SCTE-35 pass-through

– Encoding Boundary Points (EBP) support

– EIA 608/708 closed captioning

– Logo insertion

– Support for high dynamic range (HDR): HDR-10/HLG

Where we are going.

With Beamr Transcoder, Beamr’s HEVC & H.264 codec SDKs are now full video encoding solutions that can power your service to deliver the highest quality at the lowest bitrate possible. Like all Beamr solutions, the Beamr Transcoder has a fully committed road-map with the industries most reliable video technology engineering team executing it.

By leveraging Beamr’s video transcoder and the included encoding solutions, video encoding operations will operate as much as three times faster creating files that are up to 50% smaller.

To experience the performance of Beamr Transcoder which comes with an innovative business model that includes a free and premium version along with our highest rated HEVC and H.264 codec SDKs, send us an email to transcoder@beamr.com.

Visit beamr.com/transcoder to download the Beamr Transcoder VOD product information sheet or CLICK HERE for the product page.

Content Everywhere

Increasing Your Website’s Google Ranking With Smaller Images

Posted on by Dror Gill

For web users, waiting on slow-loading websites is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Those slow-moving progress bars and spinning wheels indicate you’re going nowhere fast, but what some may not realize is that the real impact reaches far beyond a poor user experience.

Google is moving to de-prioritize slow-loading sites in mobile search results. Starting in July, pagespeed will become a ranking factor in mobile web search, pushing content owners to make mobile optimization a priority in their workflows. Mobile Optimization Video Interview with RapidTV News.

For brands and content owners familiar with Google’s algorithms, you may know that Google has penalized slow-loading pages for SEO (search engine optimization) on the desktop for some time now, favoring websites built with user experience as a priority. With consumers now expecting the same experience across all of their devices, Google is extending their pagespeed policy to mobile search results. As websites transition away from static content to offer more dynamic, personalized, and engaging experiences for users, we’ve seen design, information architecture, and photo optimization turn from “nice to have” to necessities.

The Speed Update, as Google calls it, will affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to mobile users—raising the standard for all mobile sites and demanding more from your web developer.

“We encourage developers to think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics,” Google said, in a posting. “People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible. Studies show that people really care about the speed of a page.”

Of course, the challenge in creating fast mobile website experiences somewhat revolves around the other parts of the ecosystem: Mobile phones lack the processing power and memory that desktops and laptops do, for one; and, even with LTE-Advanced 4G, mobile networks are prone to congestion and slowdowns at busy times of the day. But developers do have the ability to make the experience better.

What you can do – how to get started.

The first order of business is to evaluate your website’s performance. Although no tool directly indicates whether a page is affected by the new ranking factor, Google houses Lighthouse, an automated tool for auditing the quality (performance, accessibility and more) of web pages, which developers can use in benchmarking their pages’ performance. You should also check out the mobile-friendliness of your site with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. Both Lighthouse and Mobile-Friendly are free, so there is no excuse to use them!

Next, identify where the content can be streamlined for speed. For instance, given that photos and videos are the most substantial content on your page and account for the lion’s share of bits that get transferred over the network, site owners can apply optimization tools like JPEGmini to compress image and photo file sizes without compromising quality. By reducing the size of each photo file, pages can deliver higher quality experiences to mobile users over lower-bandwidth channels (like 3G, in-flight WiFi or crowded networks), thus improving the overall user experience— giving the page’s search rankings a boost and reducing CDN cost at the same time.

Other best practices include reducing “code bloat,” where mobile sites are bogged down by excess code. Mobile sites should be as lightweight as possible, without a lot of background graphics, complex design or moving gifs. Reducing pop-up ads can also improve page-loading performance. For other ideas, Google offers PageSpeed Insights, a tool that indicates how well a page performs on the Chrome User Experience Report and suggests performance optimizations.

Sure, the intent of the search query is still pretty crucial for Google, so a slow-loading page may result in a high ranking if it has highly relevant content (for instance, an exact phrase match to the search query). And, most mobile website visits today originate from apps (think Facebook, Snapchat, and Pinterest), i.e., driving traffic to viral or curated content presented within a specific context, regardless of speed. But mobile developers should nonetheless heed the decree of Google, given that 40% of mobile web users abandon a site if it fails to load in three seconds or less.

Check out our article “Are viewers the new content aggregators?”

And those creating business pages should take particular notice: As more internet traffic moves to mobile networks, websites cannot afford to ignore the data load on their pages. So, taking the steps necessary to improve mobile page performance is now a business visibility imperative, while making your audience happier in the process.

Content EverywhereMobile VideoOTTVideo Trends

Are viewers the new content aggregators?

Posted on by Dror Gill

Consumer spending on video streaming services is expected to rise 39% this year to about $13 billion, according to the Consumer Technology Association—a staggering factoid, especially when one considers that the average consumer around the world already views 4.4 hours of video a day.

That CTA data point, released at the just-wrapped Consumer Electronics Show (CES), dovetails with a TiVo survey (also released at CES 2018) that indicates an ongoing blurring of the line between streaming and more traditional sources of content. TiVo found that 90% of households subscribe to a traditional pay TV service. Nonetheless, 60% are also subscribers to at least one streaming service, suggesting that the 4.4 waking hours of video consumption is comprised of a mix of sources—with streaming poised to take on an escalating role.

A big driver for this is the proliferation of pacts between pay-TV providers and OTT providers (for instance, Comcast’s integration of Netflix into its Xfinity X1 interface). In turn, this has created a groundswell of streaming services moving to “input one”— meaning that consumers don’t have to toggle between devices or remotes in order to tap into streamed content. That convenience factor is ushering in a new era of content consumption. On-demand binge watching as a shared experience between families and friends in the living room has made shows like Stranger Things, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Mindhunter into overnight pop-culture sensations. Streaming may still be unicast on a technical level, but it’s no longer strictly experienced by one individual viewing content on a secondary screen on his or her own, or on one platform.

“Consumers today are acting as their own aggregator, piecing together what they need from a variety of video service and device combinations to suit their individual needs,” according to the survey. “Success in this new environment will not be about a single content source monopolizing the living room, instead it will be about adapting the business model to deliver value, integrated services, and personalization to meet the evolving consumer needs.”

It helps, too, that smart TV ownership in the US has nearly doubled since 2013, with an average of three connected TV (CTV) devices owned per household, according to yet another CES survey, from Nielsen. It found that 74% of people use their CTV daily and that CTV streaming patterns mirror traditional linear TV. The highest usage by those surveyed was in the 8-11 pm prime-time block.

Along with this, mobile streaming continues to be an important part of the landscape. At CES, it was clear that the TV isn’t the only piece of real-estate catering to the OTT use case. For instance, Razer and Netflix announced a deal to make the service available on the new Razer Phone, which supports HDR video and Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 sound. It’s a device that’s tailored for high-end media consumption, with the Razer Phone standing as the first smartphone to support both premium audio and video formats for Netflix.

It’s exciting to imagine where we’ll be when next year’s CES rolls around, given that the trends we’ve highlighted here, taken together, point to OTT video beginning to permeate every corner of consumer lives (and across screens that are making it easier than ever to access it). As a result, a complex entertainment economy is emerging, where cutting-edge devices, marquee content, better carrier networks and infrastructure innovation on the compression and quality of experience front all work together to deliver new, revenue-generating consumer experiences that put the viewer in the driver seat.

AVCBeamr 5H.264H.265Video Trends

2018 Video Trends: 8K Makes a Splash

Posted on by 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 by 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 TVContent EverywhereOTT

CES 2018: Connected TV Tunes into the User Experience

Posted on by 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 AV1Apple joins AOMEncoder ApplicationsHEVC

HEVC today. AV1 tomorrow?

Posted on by 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 5H.265HDRIntel Scalable Platinum ProcessorLive

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

Posted on by 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.

Intel & Beamr set new HEVC software encoding standard 4K HDR live with 6 simultaneous channels broadcast quality

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:

  1. Power
  2. Rackspace
  3. 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 5 operating on intel scalable platinum processors offers the higher performance

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.

intel purley beamr 5 cpu utilization hitop window

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.