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Digital Rapids, a leading developer of professional hardware and software solutions for ingest, encoding, transcoding, protection, streaming, playout and delivery of content, exploits the power of Aspex's platform in their StreamZHD product.
Digital Rapids
Digital Rapids is a leading developer of professional hardware and software solutions for ingest, encoding, transcoding, protection, streaming, playout and delivery of content. Whatever the scale of your requirements - from individuals to enterprise and global workflows - they have a solution that can boost your productivity and throughput, increase your output quality, and lower your overall costs.
http://www.digital-rapids.com
The product
StreamZHD format-agile media encoding servers expand the powerful and flexible features of StreamZ into the high definition domain, offering multi-format, high-performance HD/SD content ingest, encoding, transcoding and streaming with outstanding output quality for a broad range of professional applications.
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Customer Success Story
Overview
Digital Rapids
- Leader in the development of professional hardware and software solutions for the video industry.
Challenge
- Expand the maximum combination of HD frame formats and quality in the Stream product family.
Solution
- Installed Accelera PCI-X plug-in card, providing encoding acceleration.
Benefits
- Significant performance improvements in StreamZ at maximum MPEG-2 quality settings.
- Plug-and-Play.
- No loss in quality when compared to software only solution.
- Seamless integration with Digital Rapids HD-SDI card and software
- Resolution and Bitrate independent.
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The Requirement
Digital Rapids StreamZHD provides both real-time encoding from live sources and file-to-file transcoding. Using hardware-based pre-processing to prepare the video for optimal encoding quality, the systems use a CPU-centric architecture for encoding to multiple formats. With HD material over 5x the amount of information relative to SD encoding, the StreamZHD systems were unable to perform real-time live compressed encoding at full 1920x1080/30i with maximum quality settings – a requirement of the most discerning customers.
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“...more resources are available for encoding to other output formats simultaneously, ..."
"...the Accelera gave us the confidence of a truly plug-and-play experience.”
- Mike Nann, Director of Marketing and Communications
Digital Rapids
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The Solution
Aspex Accelera 3000 was chosen as the platform for accelerating HD MPEG-2 encoding and transcoding, bringing real-time performance at top quality settings to Digital Rapids existing systems.
"The Aspex Accelera card enabled us to perform real-time 1920x1080/30i encoding on StreamZHD at a time when CPU horsepower alone could only achieve 1280x720. Even as CPU horsepower has increased to encompass the greater frame size, the Aspex Accelera still let us achieve that encoding at higher quality levels than we can with today’s CPUs,” said Mike Nann, Director of Marketing/Communications, Digital Rapids.
"Plus, by offloading some of the more complex MPEG-2 processing from the system’s processors, more resources are available for encoding to other output formats simultaneously, further boosting our customers’ productivity – an advantage that will continue even as CPUs evolve in the future."
"Moreover, the Accelera gave us the confidence of a truly plug-and-play experience. The acceleration works transparently in the background, which means that there are no operational changes to how one uses the Stream software. And as it accelerates the MainConcept API which we were already using, it gave us a very quick time-to-market."
Aspex Accelera 3000 works seamlessly with many I/O cards, including the Digital Rapids DRC-5000 series. No modification to the software application was necessary in order to get capture and encoding platforms to interact.
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About Accelera
Aspex Accelera consists of a full length PCI-X or PCI-Express plug in board and the software tools customers require to develop their products. Accelera uses four Aspex Linedancer devices containing 4096 processing elements each, an embedded RISC CPU and an ASProCore Controller. Supports Windows 2000, XP, Linux and Mac OS-X.
About AVE
Aspex Advanced Video Encoder (AVE) is the world's only multiformat HD video compression accelerator to support all three High-Definition video compression standards currently in use: MPEG-2, H.264/AVC and VC-1/WM9. The flexible nature of the AVE framework enables customers to run any codec on the same Accelera platform, providing a future-proof, multi-codec acceleration solution. The platforma is format and resolution independent, providing high quality, low bitrate encoding. Supports Windows 2000, XP, Linux and Mac OS-X.
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