Sea of transcoders: Japanese SoC company announces new Media Cloud initiative

Socionext has unveiled its new 'Media Cloud' initiative designed to improve server performance for video processing in the data center.

The program addresses the rapidly increasing mass consumption of high-quality video, and specifically the need for efficient and dense live transcoding to meet today's standards and tomorrow's 4K AVC/HEVC requirements, says Socionext.

Socionext will collaborate with partner companies to deliver data center servers among other services, including MB86M30-based servers.

The company claims that the solution, based on its multi-format codec SoC MB86M30, is capable of real-time transcoding up to 256 Bundles of AVC/ HEVC Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) streams (for 1080p60 input).

The MB86M30 handles all video-processing functions within a single chip, aiming to reduce power consumption to as low as 1/10th of conventional systems built with standard servers.

It supports encoding, decoding and transcoding of video and audio in MPEG2, AVC/ H.264 and HEVC/ H.265 with equal facility.

Socionext explains its engineers have integrated a "sea of transcoders" into standard 1RU servers with CPUs supporting established software components like FFmpeg and GStreamer.

"Social media is allowing every person to tell their story. New ways of reaching out, of sharing, have led to a proliferation in services, with video traffic taking the lion's share of content," comments Tom Miyake, corporate executive VP of Socionext.

"By leveraging our deep experience in TV broadcast equipment, and a portfolio of complex video processing SoC devices, Socionext teams are developing accelerators beneath the surface of standard servers.

"Our target is to democratize video processing, and help operators deliver quality services at a fraction of current costs."

Headquartered in Yokohama, Japan, and founded in 2015, Socionext has offices across Asia, the United States and Europe.

Yasuhiro Wakimoto, VP of the Enterprise Solution Business Unit, says, "Our hardware works under the hood, like the electric engine in a hybrid car.

"Data center management sees a familiar server – with significant savings in CAPEX and OPEX from as many as 32 dedicated transcoding units. With equal support for MPEG2, AVC and HEVC, we have a future-proof offering that enables widespread support for live content, edge optimization, conferencing, user-generated content and OTT Broadcast."