Real-time H.265 4Kp30 video encoding: Do you choose an FPGA or a 32 multi-GHz, x86 microprocessor?

By: Steve Leibson, Director of Strategic Marketing and Business Planning, Xilinx

H.265/HEVC video encoding consumes only half the bandwidth of H.264 encoding, but can achieve the same video quality, which is very important for 4K2K video. Vanguard Video has developed an H.265/HEVC video codec that supports the latest HEVC draft specification. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of this codec is that Vanguard has implemented a real-time software version of the codec for 4Kp30 video (the selected algorithm uses C language and hand-modified "to-the-max" assembly language), welcome to compare.

The software version of the codec runs in real time on four 8-core Intel Xeon microprocessors and Barco Silex has implemented the same encoder (Vanguard is written in HDL) on the Xilinx VC709 Connectivity Kit (based on a Virtex-7 690T FPGA ).

We're going to do some comparisons on this.

First, let's introduce the Vanguard Video V.265 encoder. The Vanguard Video V.265 encoder only requires 15Mbps bandwidth when encoding high-quality 4Kp30 video. If lower video quality or lower resolution is required, the bandwidth requirement is lower. The following is a block diagram showing the complexity of this encoder:

An eight-core server processor consumes about 100W of power, and the Vanguard Video V.265 encoder requires four of these processors to perform real-time HEVC encoding. The power consumption is hundreds of watts, requiring a large number of cooling fans. Using a Virtex-7 FPGA to perform the same task significantly reduces power consumption.

Vanguard Video has also developed an HEVC codec core, but it needs system integration before it can be connected to a Virtex-7 FPGA. It also needs to perform video preprocessing to support different input formats (such as SDI, DisplayPort and HDMI), a memory controller for local storage, configuration registers to make the design software programmable, a PCIe interface for host access and Ethernet for streaming output. Barco-Silex completed this integration work in preparation for a demonstration at the 2014 NAB conference in Las Vegas this week.

How does it look on a monitor? It looks great. Please visit the original link to watch the video: