Elemental Adds HEVC Support

Newly approved HEVC/H.265 codec will significantly reduce bandwidth requirements

By George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 1/30/2013 3:20:53 PM

Following the recent approval of the HEVC compression standard, video technology vendor Elemental Technologies has announced that its video processing solutions will offer support for the HEVC (high-efficiency video coding) H.265 codec via software upgrade.

The move to HEVC, which is in its infancy, promises to eventually greatly expand delivery of high-quality, high-resolution video while reducing bandwidth requirements. As massive amounts of video data distributed over the Internet consumes more network capacity, HEVC/H.265 offers bandwidth efficiency gains between 30% to 50% compared to the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 standard.

International Telecommunications Union (ITU) members gave HEVC first-stage consent earlier this month.

To achieve significant bandwidth reductions, the HEVC/H.265 codec requires, however, up to 10 times more processing power for encoding compared to H.264.

"The computational intensity of HEVC lends itself perfectly to the processing performance advantage available with graphics processing units," said Keith Wymbs, VP of marketing at Elemental, who said that the company's H.265 encoding exhibits bandwidth reductions of up to 50% compared to H.264. "Video processing software from Elemental delivers H.265 content at very low video bit rates to a wide variety of viewing devices, creating ubiquity that will richly reward content providers, broadcasters and consumers."

Elemental, which has released a whitepaper on the subject, is planning to demonstrate concurrent H.264, MPEG-2, and H.265 encoding on a single Elemental Live system at NAB in April.