Cinegy Releases New Cinecoder SDK Version, Solving Critical H.264 Interlace Encoding Challenge
Cinegy announces the release of a new version of its Cinecoder video codec SDK, solving a fundamental problem for the TV and broadcast industries.
The H.264 interlace video format is globally used for 1080i HDTV transmission via over-the-air, satellite, cable, or streaming service providers. While the adoption of newer codecs and progressive formats is increasing, the majority of HD broadcasts still use this format.
For years, software developers and solutions vendors have relied on NVIDIA GPUs’ H.264 encoding capabilities, which became a cornerstone of many media industry solutions. However, with the introduction of the Turing series of GPUs, NVIDIA ended H.264 interlace support.
While this initially caused issues, the availability of the previous Pascal generation of NVIDIA cards made it manageable. However, Pascal-based hardware availability has now ended, and these cards no longer receive NVIDIA driver updates, significantly impacting many broadcast workflows.
Cinecoder SDK Version 4.22: The Solution
Cinegy’s latest Cinecoder SDK version 4.22 addresses this challenge by enabling interlace H.264 encoding using Turing, Ampere, and Ada Lovelace (current) generation NVIDIA GPU cards.
This breakthrough benefits the broadcast and media & entertainment industries, which still deliver most of their content in this format. Current generation NVIDIA cards now offer:
- Higher performance
- Increased encoding throughput
- Improved energy efficiency
Newer cloud instances also provide better value for money with up-to-date NVIDIA drivers.
“This is a great achievement and at the same time a huge relief to all of us,” says Jan Weigner, CTO of Cinegy. “Our customers were really struggling to find a solution, especially after the driver support for the Pascal-based cards ended. Now new NVIDIA cards can be used for H.264 interlace encoding, achieving much better performance. Also, when looking at cloud deployments, we do not have to limit ourselves to using AWS G3 instances, which were the AWS instances with Pascal series GPUs.”
Benchmark Performance
Benchmarks using standard test clips show that the Cinecoder interlace H.264 encoder for NVIDIA GPUs creates the same or better-quality output than the original NVIDIA Pascal series hardware encoder.
On Ada Lovelace-based NVIDIA GPUs (the current NVIDIA generation), performance benchmarks indicate:
- 500 FPS for H.264 1080i per NVENC encoder unit.
- GPUs with two NVENC units (e.g., RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4080, RTX 4090, or professional counterparts like RTX 4000 ADA) can encode up to 1000 FPS.
For 1080i50 or 1080i59.94 streams, this translates to:
- 20 streams (1080i50) or 16 streams (1080i59.94) per NVENC.
- 40 streams (1080i50) or 32 streams (1080i59.94) using a GPU with two NVENCs.
However, the theoretical limits are subject to:
- System overheads that may reduce the actual stream numbers.
- Stream output restrictions on NVIDIA consumer cards, which can render a second NVENC unit unusable for HD streams.
“This is why you get the professional NVIDIA cards, like the RTX 2000 Ada or higher, as they have no stream output number restrictions,” explains Weigner. “They also come in more suitable form factors for use in servers, like the RTX 2000E Ada, which is single slot, half-length and half-height. That fits into anything. Or the RTX 4000 Ada, which is also single slot, but full size.”
Freedom of Choice for Broadcast Encoding Workflows
Now, broadcasters and media professionals have the freedom of choice to pick any of the current or recent NVIDIA GPUs to use in their broadcast encoding workflows.
Cinegy’s Cinecoder SDK can be licensed specifically for:
- Enabling NVIDIA GPU H.264 interlace encoding.
- Additional encoding, decoding, and media handling features.
It is also home to Cinegy’s proprietary Daniel2 codec, the world’s fastest video codec designed to run natively on GPUs – delivering:
- 10,000 FPS 4K encode capabilities.
- 30,000 FPS 4K decode capabilities.
