Advanced Television

Telestream unveils Vantage Transcode HE Server for OTT distribution

April 16, 2012

Telestream, a provider of video transcoding and workflow solutions, today announced a major new product at the NAB Show. Vantage Transcode HE Server is a highly-focused solution that accelerates transcoding and packaging for multiscreen delivery, including OTT, Web, mobile, and IPTV. Vantage® Transcode HE Server utilizes exclusive new Telestream LightSpeed™ technology to produce the highest quality images at the fastest possible speed. LightSpeed is architected for acceleration of video processing and H.264 encoding on parallel GPUs, including AMD and NVidia, and multicore CPUs, including AMD and Intel. The new transcode server addresses the unique requirements of adaptive bitrate (ABR) workflows to streamline the entire process of source file decoding, video processing, parallelized H.264 encoding, packaging, encryption, quality control, and delivery – all within a single system.

“Because it is part of the Vantage family, the Transcode HE Server provides highly-efficient, best-of-breed transcoding within a completely automated workflow,” said Barbara DeHart, vice president of marketing at Telestream. “Our customers have been asking for accelerated transcoding as part of their integrated workflow. We are pleased to offer a product which not only provides exceptional transcoding speed but also a complete workflow.”

Vantage Transcode HE Server provides decoding support for an extensive range of input file formats and accelerates H.264 encoding to Apple Adaptive Streaming, Adobe Dynamic Streaming, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, and MPEG-DASH. The x264 codec is widely recognized in the industry for producing the best H.264 image quality. By combining the power of GPUs and CPUs with x264, Vantage Transcode HE Server produces the best image quality in the least amount of time.

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.

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

As part of the Vantage product family, Vantage Transcode HE Server can be used alone, clustered to increase capacity or added to an existing Vantage ecosystem. High-density transcoding is provided in an efficient 1 RU (rack unit) server with minimal space, electrical and thermal footprint requirements.

With Vantage, every step of the workflow can be planned, managed and monitored. Workflows can be extended to include analysis, automated decision-making and enterprise-class system management to maximize efficiency, system utilization and visibility – all within a unified system.

Vantage Transcode HE Server is being featured and demonstrated along with the rest of the Vantage product family in Telestream booth SL1405 at the NAB Show. Availability is targeted for Q2 2012.

Categories: OTT, Press Releases