In the world of broadcasting, I mean with “old style” TV channels, it always takes a while for a new codec to become standard. The chain is quite complex, because you have to deal with many OTT suppliers and parties like NLZiet.
You notice that there are still quite a few ULTRA 4K channels available on these platforms, this is because the costs for TV channel owners become 4 times higher when they upgrade their HD channel to 4K channel. This is because the codecs used to create the TV signal are becoming increasingly complex and difficult to calculate. In the world of broadcasting we have agreed that 4K channels must have the HEVC codec. Also, the frame rate went from 25fps to 50fps. These agreements are necessary because the manufacturers of set-top boxes and/or TVs have to bring a product to the market that has to last at least 5 years longer with the providers and the 4K transmitter works. These products also need to be as cheap as possible to manufacture, so usually no extra chips will be taken for AV1, due to the extra costs. This is usually the case with set-top boxes.
To create a 4K TV signal I tried to create realtime output via CPU, but that’s not possible unless you want to spend more than 20K on a CPU. Fortunately, ASIC hardware solutions are now available, such as NETINT (their big customer is Netflix), which has developed special hardware for real-time encoding. With their solution you can buy a storage server and where the disks are put back you store their hardware. The OS sees these cards as disks and using SDK or FFmpeg you can transcode in parallel. Netflix is in the process of drastically reducing their render farm, because this solution allows them to transcode cost effects and also piston (certainly useful in this current energy market). You can also use GPUs for transcoding (which most parties do now), but this hardware is often larger than the CPU or disk and harder to integrate into a compact server. In addition, they consume a lot of energy and the output is not always satisfactory for professional use (personal opinion). I’ve talked to NETINT and IBC and they are planning to release the AV1 hardware board, because they notice that mostly streaming services want to switch to AV1 due to licensing costs.
[Reactie gewijzigd door Xieoxer op 30 december 2022 16:54]
