In Broadcast - April 2021 - 72

72

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 11 - Issue 4 | April 2021

InAudio

MainConcept: Unrivalled
quality, performance,
and reliability
Thomas Kramer, Vice President of Product Management at MainConcept,
a leading developer of video and audio codec solutions, explains
Hybrid GPU encoding and other recent industry innovations....
InBroadcast: Tell us about
MainConcept.
Thomas Kramer: MainConcept
provides best-of-breed video and
audio codec solutions that fuel
creativity and business globally
for professional video production
and broadcast as well as adjacent
industries like telemedicine, digital
signage and surveillance. Our software
development
kits,
transcoding
applications, and plugins are used
across industry verticals to meet
an ever-expanding list of use cases.
MainConcept codecs are engineered
to surpass the challenges of even
the most demanding use cases and
are used by organizations such as
Adobe, Sony, Autodesk, MAGIX, Dalet
Wowza, iStream Planet, and Endeavor
Streaming.

However, our customers
have
reported a big push to build out new
services for streaming and production
to support increased downstream
demand for content. The new normal
- accessing almost everything for work
and entertainment via the cloud - has
led to an enormous increase in data
usage. And that's not all. Production
workflows are moving to the cloud at a
faster rate than most predicted before
the pandemic.
This means data delivery needs to be
more efficient than ever before. That is
where we excel. Our codecs, including
HEVC and AVC, are the most efficient
in the industry. If how much you pay
for data is important, and it should be
for everyone, then the bitrate-efficient
MainConcept codecs are a natural fit
for your workflow.

InB: How has last year's global
disruption impacted the sales of
compression technology?
TK: As a B2B vendor, we have seen
our customers' clients hesitate to
invest in new hardware over the last
year. They have been looking to get
more mileage out of the equipment
they have rather than greenlighting
big-ticket capital expenses

InB: What are the benefits of
compression solutions based on
HEVC?
TK:
HEVC/H.265
has
been
commercially deployed since 2013,
so it is a relatively mature codec
that is proven to work on a variety of
hardware (including Intel and NVIDIA
GPUs) and software platforms. More
importantly, HEVC can be played

MainConcept Hybrid HEVC Encoder input/output flow

back on a vast assortment of devices
already deployed in the market.
Much is made of AV1 as an
alternative to HEVC. While the AV1
codec certainly has its merits, it
is a better fit for in-browser video
playback use cases and less suitable
for live production. The headline
bitrate efficiency for HEVC of 50%
needs to be taken with a grain of
salt. It will certainly deliver 30-40%
efficiency savings, but it all depends
on the type of content and the
applications you are using. It comes
down to this: as your video
bitrate
increases,
your
savings will also increase by
deploying HEVC.
InB: What sets MainConcept
technology apart from others in the
market?
TK: At MainConcept, we live by
three tenets: quality, performance,
and reliability. These principles
guide every aspect of our product
development process and are
exemplified by our achievements with
the HEVC codec.
MainConcept was among the first
to deploy HEVC in 2013, and we have
accumulated an exceptional amount

of experience with the technology.
In fact, the most recent MSU report,
released just this month, showed
our HEVC codec as over 20 percent
more efficient than open source. We
not only offer a quality codec that
is performant and reliable, but we
have developed an entire ecosystem
around it. With a one-stop shop, you
can integrate streaming formats like
DASH, CMAF and HLS. There is no
need to go outside the MainConcept
universe to build your process
workflow; whatever the requirements,
you can use the MainConcept API
to connect every component.
Within that API, we offer a
choice of a pure software
codec, pure hardware implementation,
or a Hybrid GPU Accelerated version.
InB: Can you elaborate on what
Hybrid GPU encoding means?
TK: The MainConcept Hybrid HEVC
Encoder bridges the gap between highquality software and fast-performing
hardware encoding by combining
the best of both worlds - using the
processing power of the NVIDIA RTX
architecture for the heavy lifting while
the MainConcept algorithms for bitrate
control and high-quality software
encoding operations are executed in
the software.
Our Hybrid GPU delivers up to 2.5x
faster processing, allowing more live
channels per server with less demand
for CPU resources when encoding
and reducing hardware expenditure.
You will see greater efficiency with
HEVC in general, and particularly with
Hybrid GPU accelerated encoding, as
the data rates of the media increase.
Currently, we are seeing this trend in
markets like Japan and Korea, which
are adopting 4K UHD faster than the
rest of the world. We have customers
using our hybrid GPU encoders for live
broadcasts, for internet streaming,
and IPTV. We have even
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