Following the recent approval of the HEVC compression
standard, video technology vendor Elemental Technologies has announced that its
video processing solutions will offer support for the HEVC (high-efficiency video
coding) H.265 codec via software upgrade.
The move to HEVC, which is in its infancy, promises to
eventually greatly expand delivery of high-quality, high-resolution video while
reducing bandwidth requirements. As massive amounts of video data distributed
over the Internet consumes more network capacity, HEVC/H.265 offers bandwidth
efficiency gains between 30% to 50% compared to the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 standard.
InternationalTelecommunications Union (ITU) members gave HEVC first-stage consent
earlier this month.
To achieve significant bandwidth reductions, the HEVC/H.265
codec requires, however, up to 10 times more processing power for encoding
compared to H.264.
"The computational intensity of HEVC lends itself perfectly
to the processing performance advantage available with graphics processing
units," said Keith Wymbs, VP of marketing at Elemental, who said that the
company's H.265 encoding exhibits bandwidth reductions of up to 50% compared to
H.264. "Video processing software from Elemental delivers H.265 content at very
low video bit rates to a wide variety of viewing devices, creating ubiquity
that will richly reward content providers, broadcasters and consumers."
Elemental, which has released a whitepaper on the subject,
is planning to demonstrate concurrent H.264, MPEG-2, and H.265 encoding on a
single Elemental Live system at NAB in April.
