As the supply of video has grown, so has the codec industry. The increase in video streaming platforms, the rise of live streaming, and the variety of devices on which video can be viewed has made encoding important. With the diligent emergence of high-performance codecs, the importance of encoding has grown, and so has the demand for it.

Video codecs are based on video quality & speed of transmitting, and a type of video can determine which performance is more important: Quality or Speed. For example, live streaming requires low video quality but fast video delivery, streaming pre-produced video requires higher quality than video delivery, and a video platform company that needs to stream a lot of videos, they need both quality and speed. As a result, codec engineers are bringing to market higher performing codecs and encoders optimized for video services.

Software Encoder & Hardware Encoder

Software encoders primarily use CPU to encoding videos. It is easy to add more features at any time if you need more, allowing you to compress video with higher performance compared to hardware. There are no constraints at the development stage, it can freely add or remove different coding tools inside the codecs supported by the compression standard to develop an encoder that is optimized for user. Especially, high performance encoder is expected to be in high demand as it can meet all the needs of video service companies in the current industry trend of using video in various forms. However, CPU is not a processor for video compression only, so it is slow to process video and compressing high-resolution video can be need more network because it required a lot of computation.

The biggest advantage of hardware encoder is “Fast Processing Speed”. Compared to software encoder, it compresses video at blazing fast speeds, making it ideal for encoding large volumes of footage. Moreover, hardware encoder can achieve superior encoding performance because they use a specialized chip for video compression without using CPU. However, while high efficiency of compression can be an advantage because it is processed by semiconductor chips, but the disadvantage is that it is hard to add various coding tools inside the codec to customize compression user’s needs. It is semiconductor chip, so you can add any features you want during initial design, but it is hard to add features after design.

Increasing demand for encoding creates specialized semiconductor chips.

It is available to develop encoding specialized chip because driven by increasing the demand for video – the demand for encoding. In addition, since most video stream platforms are managing a lot of videos through data centers, the demand for encoding chips for data centers has increased significantly. Here’s the thing, when using encoders for data centers, you need to consider not only speed and quality but also poser usage efficiency. Because data centers use hundreds of thousands of servers, and every little bit of efficiency can save a lot of money.

BLUEDOT, develop high efficiency video technologies, developed its transcoding semiconductor IP for data center, it focused on increasing power efficiency. Designed to take advantage of hardware encoders for fast processing speed to reduce power usage for cost-effectiveness, and developed by the same codec experts who created the world’s 3^rd most high-performance codec, users encoding videos with optimized codec for quality and data. So it is ideal solution to compress high-resolution video at high volumes.

While these good encoders are being actively developed, new standards are also emerging to develop codecs with even higher performance. AOMedia, the developer of AV1, which is called next generation video codec, is defining a new standard called AV2, and ITU-T/MPEG announced a codec called VVC in 2019. High-performance encoders and codecs are a testament to the growing demand for video, and unless the demand for video slows down, we’ll continue to see more video industry technologies emerge to help us enjoy our videos seamlessly.