Kontron, a global leader in telecom, network and cloud infrastructure platform solutions, and Vantrix, a global provider of media delivery solutions to service and content providers today announced the release of two new high performance transcoding products – Vantrix’s multiscreen live transcoder and VoD (Video-on-Demand) transcoder.
The products were designed for service providers and high volume content providers to address the challenges of increasing demands of supporting multiple device screen formats ranging from connected TVs to computers to mobile handsets. The transcoders support all standard formats, including 4k UHD and processing for Adaptive Bitrate delivery (ABR).
Both products are operating on a high density Kontron SYMKLOUD platform. The 2RU-sized appliance is powered by Intel Core i7 processors with Intel Iris Pro Graphics. Vantrix performance testing yielded up to 180 live 1080p HD video streams or up to 10x real-time VoD HD offline transcoding per file. The appliance can also deliver up to 18 4k@60p live streams and is HEVC-ready.
Vantrix’s software is installed as a virtual appliance and operates on Openstack, enabling flexibility and scalability. A single appliance can run concurrent applications – such as Live and VoD transcoding, DRM encryption, and streaming – with selectable resource assignments for different uses. In addition, the system easily scales across multiple appliances in a cluster that shares virtual resources on all physical nodes without additional management software required.
The processing density of these appliances is impressive, states Don Vendetti, Vantrix’s SVP of Marketing and Product Management. The Kontron SYMKLOUD with Intel processors enables us to demonstrate a significant volume of live streams or simultaneous transcoding operations to support ABR, 4K and even HEVC, all in a compact 2RU package. Additionally, it allows us to reduce the typical cost of live and VoD transcoding by 25 percent or more.
Kontron’s Business Development Director Telecom-Cloud Sven Freudenfeld adds: The density increase provided by our SYMKLOUD appliance is a perfect match for the Vantrix transcoding application and provides a major reduction in needed footprint, CAPEX and OPEX for service providers. In addition, the power requirements are slashed to just 6 watts per HD channel. The Vantrix virtual appliance also supports high scalability for large mobile broadcast events, such as live sports.
Vantrix used the Intel Media Software Development Kit to quickly build and optimize for Intel Iris Pro graphics hardware, which is part of the 4th generation Intel Core processors, said Bill Rollender, Marketing Director, Intel Communications Infrastructure Division. High density, low power transcoding is ever more critical for content providers to address the explosion of devices in the market. Ease of management of these transcoding resources will be a key requirement for these providers.