Live From NAB: Telestream Goes Full ‘LightSpeed’ Ahead With New Vantage Products

This week, Telestream hit Las Vegas for the NAB Show with what it believes to be the next great leap ahead in video processing: LightSpeed. Incorporated into the company’s two new Vantage transcoding products, Vantage 4 and Vantage Transcode HE Server, LightSpeed delivers five times greater performance to the Vantage product lines, according to Telestream.

“LightSpeed is an approach to acceleration that will take us through the next decade,” says VP of Marketing Barb DeHart. “It is a key strategic investment for us as a company from an acceleration point of view. Vantage is the first recipient of that technology. It delivers extremely fast, high-quality H.264 video.”

LightSpeed technology uses OpenCL to drastically accelerate video processing, transcoding, and H.264 encoding. LightSpeed is architected for parallel GPUs (including AMD and NVIDIA) and multicore CPUs (including AMD and Intel).

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.

“Because we have this hardware-acceleration strategy with LightSpeed, we are able to offload all that video processing to the GPUs and let the CPUs do what they do best, which is encoding,” says DeHart. “In terms of Vantage, that increases picture quality and speed by up to five times.”

LightSpeed technology is available in the optional new Vantage LightSpeed Accelerator, a 1RU transcoding server. All Vantage Transcode products can be run on a LightSpeed Accelerator, and DeHart says the company plans to use the technology for other Telestream products in the future.

Vantage Begins Fourth Chapter
Vantage 4.0 provides more-sophisticated algorithms for scaling and deinterlacing and full 16-bit 4:4:4:4 processing, never before available in any CPU-based transcoding product.

Vantage 4.0 adds support for the x264 codec for H.264 transcoding, as well as additional support for broadcast and sports file formats. Vantage 4.0 also includes the new CALM Act loudness and Accessibility Act Web caption support, greater support for Avid production workflows, and Screen subtitling and captioning workflows.

Newest Member of the Vantage Family
Vantage Transcode HE Server accelerates transcoding and packaging for multiscreen delivery (OTT, Web, mobile, and IPTV). The product aims to streamline adaptive-bitrate (ABR) delivery workflow, including source-file decoding, video processing, parallelized H.264 encoding, packaging, encryption, quality control, and delivery.

“The core Vantage Transcode products will remain as they are. This is a new transcode product that can sit next to them or operate independently,” says DeHart. “It offers a whole new set of possibilities for those already using Vantage, as well as new users.”

Vantage Transcode HE Server, which is also driven by LightSpeed technology, provides decoding support for a range of input file formats and accelerates H.264 encoding to Apple Adaptive Streaming, Adobe Dynamic Streaming, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, and MPEG-DASH.

In addition to accelerating transcoding, Vantage Transcode HE Server packages the media, together with thumbnail images, closed captions, and metadata into ABR-compliant packages, for delivery directly to origin servers or CDNs.

Vantage Transcode HE Server can be used alone, clustered to increase capacity, or added to an existing Vantage ecosystem. Availability is targeted for this quarter.

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