V-Nova, Xilinx Launch Perseus Dense Transcoder-Accelerator

V-Nova, a provider of video compression solutions, and Xilinx, which specializes in adaptive and intelligent computing, today announced the availability of Perseus XSA, an easily-deployable plug-and-play encoding accelerator for existing live or VOD encoding pipelines and Perseus XDE, a native encoding solution running entirely on FPGA. Both solutions are available for Xilinx’s Alveo cards and deliver unparalleled video quality and processing density in private or public clouds.

Xilinx Alveo Data Center accelerator cards are designed to meet the constantly changing needs of data centers, providing up to 90x performance increase over CPUs for common workloads, including machine learning, video transcoding, and database search and analytics.

Xilinx FPGA platforms are broadly deployed across leading cloud platforms including AWS, Alibaba Cloud and Huawei as well as leading video service providers like Twitch.

Perseus Plus is a codec-agnostic video compression technology that can be added to any standard encoder such as AVC/h.264, HEVC, VP9 and — in the future — AV1. Perseus Plus was designed from the ground-up to deliver next-generation compression efficiencies at much lighter overall processing, further boosting the advantages of FPGA-based solutions.

Perseus XSA is designed with hyper-scale live encoding operators such as e-sports operators and social networks in mind. The solution is compatible with all major server hardware and existing software encoding, leveraging Perseus Plus to enhance the underlying codec and providing a 4x increase in the number of channels or streams per server. Alternatively, adopting the XDE solution enables even greater density and 4Kp60 real-time transcoding on a single Xilinx Alveo card.

The companies say the bundled V-Nova and Xilinx solution “is an industry first, being able to enhance quality and accelerate throughput of existing large-scale software transcoding deployments, allowing both a reduction of 4x in transcoding cost and 4Kp60 real-time transcoding on systems that until today were only capable of HD transcoding.”