Telestream introduces world's first hardware x264 transcoding device

[hajj_3]

http://www.telestream.net/company/press/2012-04-16-Vantage-4.0.htm

It looks as though this is a hardware encoding device that fits in a server rack.

I wonder how it performs. Do google/facebook just use xeon cpu's to encode their videos in x264? I think Dark Shikari should contact telestream and try and get a free device to test out. Was hoping this was going to be a chip that could be included on a PCI-E card for end users rather than a server device :(

[nm]

They offer software that runs on common Intel/AMD CPUs and OpenCL-compatible GPUs. The hardware part is an optional reference design.

[Blue_MiSfit]

This has me very interested as well! By itself, x264 in a supported, enterprise grade, clustered encoding system is huge. GPU acceleration is astonishing, to say the least. We will see.

Until now, everyone that uses x264 professionally has developed their own clustering system in-house, and ran as-is, on Xeon / Opteron CPUs.


So yeah, the GPU is used for decoding, scaling, filtering etc. This is a good fit, and actually makes sense.


Derek

[CruNcher]

yep its a combined solution that makes it interesting though i wonder how they incorporate the GPU via part of slices encoded by it or chunks i guess part of slices would be to hard todo so most probably chunks get encoded on the GPU when other chunks get encoded by the CPU ;) so their should be i guess also a difference visible in these chunks ;)
I would also say this is the first real competition against Elementals Server and GPU Vendor independent (not CUDA exclusive) :)
Though Elemental will start to also utilize Nvidias DSP next combining it with the GPU this will give it another boost ;)

Also it's the first product if i see it right that doesn't fully sets on Mainconcept by them after they licensed x264, though if they use the chunk version that i guess it could be actually that they use Mainconcepts OpenCL Encoder combined with x264 CPU part, i even experimented with combining Nvidia, Intel and x264 together into 1 Framework though it's pretty hard to get this efficiently under control especially many issues in the cross talk here that you need for maximum performance aren't fixable you have all the time to workaround them and are fully dependent on what the OS and GFX driver does.

Blue_MiSfit if you interested in this keep an eye on http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=164555 where i will put more things in the future :)

[kieranrk]

There is no GPU acceleration to x264 as far as we know in Telestream. This is just marketing fluff.

[CruNcher]

As i said then they most probably combine it with Mainconcepts OpenCL (GPU) X264 (CPU) Encoder in a chunked Encoding Scenario

[Atak_Snajpera]

i don't think so. x264 offers always better quality than any gpu based solution. unless you intentionally use ultrafast profile :) besides i wouldn't be happy when some chunks looked noticable better than others. variable quality mode ;) LOL!

[nm]

Looks like the OpenCL part only does filtering. From http://www.telestream.net/company/press/2012-04-16-Vantage-Transcode-HE-Server.htm:
Telestream LightSpeed™ technology accelerates video processing and transcoding– including scaling, deinterlacing, frame rate conversion, motion vector calculation, compositing and other compute-intensive tasks. It significantly accelerates transcoding performance for simultaneous encoding to multiple resolutions and bitrates in the shortest possible time.

[smok3]

is it only me, or is it funny when suddenly commercial stuff becomes "pro" by using x264? :)

[Blue_MiSfit]

I'd say it's always been "pro". Now it's actually pro. :)

[Atak_Snajpera]

and average x264 users have been pro from the begining :)

[CruNcher]

i don't think so. x264 offers always better quality than any gpu based solution. unless you intentionally use ultrafast profile :) besides i wouldn't be happy when some chunks looked noticable better than others. variable quality mode ;) LOL!

Thats not a big problem if you balance both in the same direction though it would make x264 becoming useless somewhat in terms of its higher purpose then just speed that's correct (but Broadcast pros mostly care about speed and overall efficiency especially when doing Distributed Encoding every cycle counts every Watt matters, see Benwaggoners situation now @ Amazon he surely can tell you something about it) ;)