KulaByte speeds up video encoding

SOFTWARE COMPANY, KulaByte along with AMD, demonstrating cutting edge video optimisation technologies at a href=<"http://www.nabshow.com" target=blank>NAB in Las Vegas.

KulaByte's products are designed for the second generation of digital video encoding. KulaByte reckons it delivers tremendous efficiencies and quality improvements for customers in virtually any industry that requires digital video transfer, storage, or transmission. The product currently supports multiple codec options, resolutions of up to 1080p, NTSC, PAL, SIF, QSIF as well as 2-Pass Variable Bit Rate encoding processes.

TimeSlice technology, which is proprietary to KulaByte, enables faster-than-real-time 2-pass Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding, which is a first for the video encoding industry. The software works by dividing each video file into short time slices and independently encoding each time slice with two-pass VBR. Each time slice can be anywhere from less than a second up to the size of the targeted client size buffer, which is typically around five seconds.

In traditional one or two-pass VBR encoding, the Q value is the same throughout an entire video stream. With KulaByte, a specific 2PVBR bit rate is applied individually to each time slice and then the Q of each time slice is normalized to meet the specified output bit rate resulting in a constant bit rate (CBR) compatible stream that does not drop any frames.

In its booth, KulaByte is demonstrating its professional product on an AMD Opteron 16-way platform. The product's performance scales with the amount of CPU cores in the system. KulaByte currently has plans to support AMD's upcoming 4-way Barcolona platform. By fully utilising AMD's Barcolona platform, the software will have the ability to access all 32-cores for encoding purposes. Combining KulaByte's TimeSlice technology with AMD's multi-core Direct Connect architecture, enables industry-standard codecs to perform at their fastest rates, requiring less bandwidth, and provide users with extremely high performance.

Charlie Boswell of AMD pointed out that home user applications is the logical next step for the company, and plans to introduce prosumer and consumer based products were announced late yesterday. One of my favorite features of the product is that they designed a simple to use interface for end users.

The intuitive design allows for full control of your encoding, by simply selecting your sources and destinations. For users who require move advanced control, KulaByte has made it available through command line based system. The software represents a next step in video encoding technology. µ