Harmonic cherry-picks Altera solution for H.265 4Kp60 video encoding

Altera Corp. from its barrio has announced that Harmonic, the worldwide leader in video delivery infrastructure, has cherry-picked Altera’s new 4Kp60-capable H.265 enhanced motion estimation engine (EME), a server co-processing solution based on the company’s Stratix V FPGAs to dramatically improve efficacy and performance of Harmonic’s PURE Compression Engine aimed at the delivery of 4Kp60 content.

Altera’s Stratix V FPGAs, optimized with IP from Altera and its partners, facilitates Harmonic’s market-leading encoding technology to be able to afford 4Kp60 real-time performance, while requiring substantially less power, rack space and CPU processing power than other solutions prevalent in the industry today. Altera’s EME saves precious CPU cycles by way of offloading Server-class CPUs, reserving more processing power to deliver industry-leading efficiency and video quality today, with spare capacity for even more improvements tomorrow.

A demonstration of the products delivering 4Kp60 real-time performance will be featured in the Harmonic booth # SU1210 and Altera booth # SU11110 during the 2014 NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 7-10. The offering makes use of Altera’s Advanced System Development Kit, built for demanding 4K and even 8K video transport and processing needs.

In sharing the news at NAB, Mark Hoopes, who manages Altera’s Video Codec Solutions alleged, “As video traffic explodes to consume the vast majority of available network bandwidth, and as users expect more content, anywhere, anytime, with significantly improved quality of experience, the need for a high quality H.265 encoder that enables typical bitrate savings of 50 percent becomes critical.”

Supplementing that – “Achieving such efficiency gains comes at an unprecedented increase in processing power required when compared to legacy H.264 or MPEG-2. With the power of Altera’s EME solution to reduce CPU processing needs, vendors will be well equipped now and in the future to create products that lead the way as the industry’s most efficient and highest quality H.265 solutions.”

Tom Lattie, VP, Product Marketing, at Harmonic, held that: “Through a combination of our H.265 software with hardware acceleration from Altera’s EME solution, customers will be able to deliver amazing 4Kp60 video quality while lowering their capital and operating expenses through decreased power and rack space. The complete solution is software and hardware programmable, enabling field updates for continued algorithm enhancements in the future.”

NAB attendees can now stop by the Altera booth to see the live 4Kp60 H.265 encoding demo and to learn how the solution could augment their 4K or multi-channel HD H.265 roadmaps, assisting faster time to market with products that offer higher overall performance and lower total cost of ownership than that of alternative solutions.