New ATEME EAVC4 Codec Enhances MPEG-4

PARIS--ATEME this week introduced EAVC4, the newest addition to its line of H.264 compliant video encoding technologies. The company says the enhanced MPEG-4 codec improves bandwith gains for progressive and interlaced content by 20 percent, based on objective measures and even higher gains based on visual perception; targets improved resolution for mobile devices, and offers future proofing for 4K and 8K, 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma, up to 14-bit coding precision and AVC-Intra only coding. 

"As the pace of change of formats, requirements and new business models reaches continues to quicken, product form factors are drifting away from dedicated hardware appliances toward agile software solutions. This trend is particularly pronounced in segments such as production and multi-screen transcoders, and is creeping into traditional hardware domains such as linear pay TV encoding," said Avni Rambhia, senior industry analyst, Frost & Sullivan.

EAVC4 leverages a patented technique called "Multi-Screen by Design"—a new approach to processing video for multi-screen output. Relying on intelligent parallelization to perform common processes only one time for all bit-rates and screen formats, EAVC4 delivers speed improvements and optimizes video fidelity for multiple outputs from a single content stream. This enables broadcast and broadband professionals to offer an optimal blend of processing speed, video quality, multi-screen capabilities and resource efficiency.

"As a long-time leader in the video encoding space, ATEME is well underway with plans for HEVC product releases. However, it is clear that the need for higher performance, encoding flexibility and improved multi-screen capabilities is not something that users can simply defer until the full testing and adoption of future HEVC solutions," said Pierre Larbier, chief technology officer, ATEME. "Today's video encoding systems must not only support large-scale, continuous video encoding operations, but they must also offer a high degree of flexibility for outputting different levels of video quality, frame-rates, bit-rates and screen resolution. The release of EAVC4 addresses the ever-escalating consumer demand for rich video content now, and empowers broad access across an increasing number of viewer devices."

ATEME's EAVC4 will be available in the coming weeks in the TITAN family of transcoders including TITAN FILE, TITAN Live and TITAN KFE.