NAB Show: VisualOn Debuts New Optimizer CAE Solution

VisualOn, a provider of video software technology, announced “significant enhancements” for its AI-enhanced universal content-adaptive encoding (CAE) solution, the VisualOn Optimizer. At the 2024 NAB Show in Las Vegas (April 14-17), Booth W3225, VisualOn will demonstrate three ways that video service providers can maximize video efficiency with its new Optimizer Hi-Fi for video storage applications, Optimizer VOD for VOD video streaming, and Optimizer Live for real-time streaming. Using VisualOn’s innovative Optimizer solutions, service providers “can drastically simplify video streaming, reduce delivery costs, and elevate viewing experiences,” the company says.

Yang Cai, VisualOn president-CEO, says: “After introducing Optimizer at last year’s IBC Show, we’ve identified several use cases for our AI-enhanced CAE solution. At this year’s NAB Show, we’ll showcase how Optimizer shrinks video bitrates while maintaining or improving visual quality and lowering operating expenses for video storage, VOD, and live applications.”

Optimizer Hi-Fi “is a state-of-the-art, visually lossless file-to-file video transcoding solution, the company says. “Leveraging VisualOn’s CAE technology, Optimizer Hi-Fi reduces the storage requirements of massive mezzanine video files by up to 80%. Optimizer Hi-Fi achieves visually lossless quality with consistently high VMAF, PSNR, and SSIM scores, while simultaneously reducing server-to-server and cloud-to-premise file transfer times. Optimizer Hi-Fi is a must-have solution for delivering high-quality video and optimizing storage and bandwidth resources.”

Cai adds: “High fidelity has traditionally been used to describe outstanding-quality audio, but the same principles apply to video. With our Optimizer Hi-Fi, video service providers can deliver video streaming content exactly as it was intended, without any visual degradations.”

Optimizer VOD is an AI-enhanced universal CAE solution for VOD streaming. Based on efficient AI models, it analyzes content before transcoding and dynamically configures the transcoder to achieve target quality (as measured by VMAF score) using the minimum number of bits, reducing average bitrate by over 54% in production without compromising visual quality. In addition, Optimizer VOD supports VOD workflows through implementation of simultaneous multi-ABR ladder transcoding, and significantly reduces CPU consumption compared to dual-pass encoding methods.

Optimizer Live is designed for live streaming use cases without adding any additional latency. The company says: “Using the AI-enhanced CAE solution, video service providers can achieve target quality with bitrate savings of up to 60%. Optimizer Live effectively halves average bitrates and reduces peak bitrates by more than one-third, while preserving or improving visual quality for a wide variety of different content types.”

Optimizer works natively with the FFmpeg framework. It has already been integrated with, and verified for, NVIDIA’s H.264, HEVC, and AV1 GPU accelerated encoders; NETINT’s ASIC encoders; as well as open-source encoders such as x264, x265, and SVT-AV1.