The What: Haivision announced its HEVC baseband encoding and HEVC / H.264 transcoding solution, Kraken HEVC, providing significantly better video quality for backhaul over constricted networks.
Built on Haivision’s Kraken transcoder platform, the new HEVC implementation is designed for government and enterprise applications such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and video backhaul contribution. Within these environments, the challenge is to achieve the best picture quality over satellite and other constrained networks (typically in the 1 Mbps to 3 Mbps bandwidth range). Using Haivision’s implementation of HEVC, early adopters have experienced picture quality gains of up to 50 percent over H.264.
The What Else: For Kraken HEVC users, the workflow involves receiving high bitrate H.264 streams or baseband inputs, converting these signals to HEVC for transport, and then reconverting the stream from HEVC to H.264 for distribution throughout their ecosystem.
Why This Matters: “We are leading the market in HEVC and delivering optimized HEVC solutions for our clients,” said Mahmoud Al-Daccak, chief technology officer at Haivision. “Developed in collaboration with a number of government customers, we are helping them squeeze the most out of costly and constricted contribution networks for mission critical applications. While others may be driving towards 4K, our initial HEVC efforts are focused on addressing our customers’ current challenges.”
