MulticoreWare Announces UHDkit Advanced HEVC Video Encoding Library, Powered By X265

April 18, 2016

Developers of x265, the world’s leading HEVC / H.265 encoder, debut an extended library for faster, more efficient HEVC video encoding.

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — MulticoreWare, developers of the category-leading x265 HEVC video encoder, announce the immediate availability of UHDkit, an extended encoding library built on top of the x265 HEVC encoder. MulticoreWare will demonstrate UHDkit to professionals attending the National Association of Broadcasters Show this week in Las Vegas. UHDkit is designed to meet the advanced requirements of commercial video solution providers, from TV broadcasters, web-based streaming media services, and video encoding hardware and software developers.

Streaming video providers generally utilize adaptive bit rate encoding; encoding each video title to multiple bit rate tiers. By encoding multiple bit rates in parallel while intelligently sharing insights across multiple x265 instances, UHDkit can encode to multiple bit rates at twice as fast as with x265 alone. The results are virtually identical in quality and efficiency to encodes that are done individually.

“UHD content places significant demands on video processing workflows due to the large volumes of data. This necessitates innovations in transcoding technologies,” said David Sayed, VP Product Management, Media Technologies, Brightcove, Inc. “We’re pleased to see the advances that MulticoreWare is making with UHDkit around quality and performance.”

UHDkit is also enabling high quality live 4K encoding on affordable hardware. Video service providers prefer the flexibility and visual quality of software-based encoding solutions. Until now, due to the extreme computational demands of high quality 4K HEVC encoding, broadcasters have had to resort to expensive 4 socket or cluster-based servers. UHDkit can produce high quality, high bit rate 4K, 10 bit video at 60 FPS on a dual socket server, enabling software-based quality and features at an affordable system cost.

UHDkit also features an advanced control system which dynamically maximizes quality while insuring real-time performance. Instead of using conservative quality settings to insure real-time performance, live video encoding is dynamically optimized to achieve much higher quality on any computer platform.