Cinegy Unlocks NVIDIA H.264 Interlace Encoding on NVIDIA GPUs

20 December 2024

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Munich, Germany - 20th December 2024 - Cinegy announces the release of a new version of its Cinecoder video codec SDK that solves a fundamental problem for TV and broadcast.

The H.264 interlace video format is globally used for 1080i HDTV transmission via over-the-air, satellite, cable or streaming service providers. The majority of HD broadcasts still use this format even if the adoption of newer codecs and progressive formats is increasing. For years software developers and solutions vendors were using Nvidia GPUs H.264 encoding capabilities and they became a cornerstone of many solutions for the media industry.

Problem

With the introduction of the Turing series of GPUs NVIDIA ended H.264 interlace support. This caused issues, but as long as the previous Pascal generation of NVIDIA cards was still available this was a nuisance but not a showstopper. NVIDIA based hardware deployments on-site and within cloud instances continued based on the older Pascal generation continued whenever customers needed H.264 interlaced encoding. Pascal-based hardware availability has ended, but worse, Pascal series cards no longer receive NVIDIA driver updates, which represents the final nail in the coffin of NVIDIA card usage in many broadcast workflows.

Solution

This is where Cinegy's Cinecoder comes to the rescue. Cinegy's latest Cinecoder SDK as of version 4.22 enables interlace H.264 encoding using Turing, Ampere, and Ada Lovelace (current) generation NVIDIA GPU cards.

This is good news for the broadcast and media & entertainment industry, still delivering most of its content in this format. Now current generation NVIDIA cards with much higher performance, higher encoding throughput and better energy efficiency can be used. Newer cloud instances can be chosen that provide better value for money - and that use up-to-date NVIDIA drivers.

Cinegy has been using its Cinecoder video codec SDK in its own products for decades, but it is also licensed by many OEM customers that use it in their products.

The Cinecoder video codec SDK exists for Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android and iOS, although for NVIDIA support only Windows and Linux are relevant platforms.

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 e.g. using AWS G3 instances, which were the AWS instances with Pascal series GPUs.

Benchmarks

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.

The chart below shows a standard PSNR test performed with the same test clips being encoded into a H.264 1080i stream at 12 Mbps with a 12:3 GOP structure - with the red graph being a Pascal series hardware encoder and the blue graph being the Cinecoder using an Ada Lovelace GPU. Three test clips were used, which is very visible looking at the graphs displaying notably different PSNR levels, a direct result of the varying complexity of the source video material.

Click for high resolution version

The encode performance on Ada Lovelace based NVIDIA GPUs, the current NVIDIA generation, is around 500 FPS for H.264 1080i per NVENC encoder unit, which means that cards with two NVENC units, such as the RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4070 Ti Super, RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 (or their professional counterparts like the RTX 4000 ADA and up) can encode around 1000 FPS. Translating this into 1080i50 or 1080i59.94 stream numbers this would theoretically result in 20 respectively 16 streams for a single NVENC or 40 respectively 32 streams when using a GPU with two NVENCs. Theoretically, as a) there are usually other system overheads that reduce the number and b) NVIDIA consumer cards have a hard limit number of enabled output streams, that makes a second NVENC unit useless, at least when encoding only 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 Jan 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.

Now broadcasters and media professionals have once again 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 just for enabling NVIDIA GPU H.264 interlace encoding or for all the additional encoding, decoding as well as media handling features. It is also the home of Cinegy's very own Daniel2 codec, the world's fastest video codec, designed to run on GPUs natively - with over 10,000 FPS 4K encode and 30,000 FPS 4K decode.

About Cinegy

Cinegy is a leading R&D company focusing on core audio/video processing technologies. For more than twenty years Cinegy has been developing software defined, highly scalable and massive parallel solutions for all areas of image and video processing. Its customers are in various industries, pre-dominantly media & entertainment, broadcast, and video production, but increasingly also in professional AV, hospitality, security, government, and defense.

Cinegy has developed its own core technologies in the areas of image and video codecs, media processing pipelines, large scale media asset management, and media delivery.

Customers include most international broadcasters, major studios

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