V-Nova and Xilinx® launch high-quality PERSEUS™ dense transcoder and accelerator

• Solution natively delivers live 4Kp60 encoding on a single FPGA card or accelerates existing HD software and hardware codec workflows by a factor of 4x.

• PERSEUS Plus provides up to 50% compression efficiency at 4x the density of previously available solutions coupled with broad consumer device support.

• PERSEUS solution offers support for FFmpeg workflows and is available as a bundle with the Xilinx Alveo™ card for private cloud and on-premise deployment.

London, UK and San Jose, US – 21 March 2019 – V-Nova, a leading provider of video compression solutions, and Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) the leader in adaptive and intelligent computing, today announced the availability of PERSEUS XSA, an easily-deployable plug-and-play encoding accelerator for existing live or VOD encoding pipelines and PERSEUS XDE, a native encoding solution running entirely on FPGA. Both solutions are available for Xilinx’s Alveo cards and deliver unparalleled video quality and processing density in private or public clouds.

Xilinx Alveo Data Center accelerator cards are designed to meet the constantly changing needs of the modern Data Center, providing up to 90x performance increase over CPUs for common workloads, including machine learning, video transcoding, and database search and analytics. Xilinx FPGA platforms are broadly deployed across leading cloud platforms including AWS, Alibaba Cloud and Huawei as well as leading video service providers like Twitch. 

PERSEUS Plus is a codec-agnostic video compression technology that can be added to any standard encoder such as AVC/h.264, HEVC, VP9 and – in the future - AV1. PERSEUS Plus was designed from the ground-up to deliver next-generation compression efficiencies at much lighter overall processing, further boosting the advantages of FPGA-based solutions. 

PERSEUS XSA is designed with hyper-scale live encoding operators such as e-sports operators and social networks in mind. The solution is compatible with all major server hardware and existing software encoding, leveraging PERSEUS Plus to enhance the underlying codec and providing a 4x increase in the number of channels or streams per server. Alternatively, adopting the XDE solution enables even greater density and 4Kp60 real-time transcoding on a single Xilinx Alveo card. 

“The extreme processing capabilities of our FPGA solutions only matter when paired with IP that can truly leverage it” said Sean Gardner, senior marketing manager, Cloud Video, Xilinx. “PERSEUS Plus is the perfect example of that, and we’re excited about the potential this solution has to deliver a higher-quality video experience to millions of users whilst saving millions for the operators serving them. For services delivering thousands of streams a day these savings are transformative.” 

“We are really proud to announce the availability of PERSEUS XSA and PERSEUS XDE.”, Guido Meardi, CEO and co-founder at V-Nova, said, “The explosion of streaming services across the globe requires the best efficiencies in every part of the delivery chain. The combination of our PERSEUS Plus technology and Xilinx FPGA simply enables best quality video per bit, in the most cost-efficient way. This is valuable to all service providers and especially those that are looking to scale on cloud platforms, where the combination of V-Nova PERSEUS Plus and Xilinx FPGAs is ready to provide this step-change in the video quality and processing cost trade-off that can redefine the bottom line for video service operators.” 

The bundled V-Nova and Xilinx solution is an industry first being able to enhance quality and accelerate throughput of existing large-scale software transcoding deployments, allowing both a reduction of 4x in transcoding cost and 4Kp60 real-time transcoding on systems that until today were only capable of HD transcoding.