AVT Question: Please share insight into display technology trends, new form factors, and applications.
Thought Leader: Rob Moodey, Manager of Strategic Partnerships at Matrox Video
It comes as no surprise that more and more of what we watch—wherever we watch it—is being streamed, rather than being a file that is saved and played locally. Even the content we are recording in the field is increasingly being stored and processed in the cloud. And what goes up, as the saying goes, must come down.
Do the AV/IT products that they are thinking about—software or hardware—give them the flexibility to change their mind?" — Rob Moodey, Manager of Strategic Partnerships at Matrox Video
The lesson is clear: We need to look for AV/IT solutions that have a clear direction in decoding, and possibly in encoding too.
There are some who say that codec functionality should be in software, run on a CPU, and essentially be part of a browser. Others will say that local hardware can provide decoding much faster than software. They typically use GPUs or other ASICs to provide the processing resource. And a third group follows the FPGA approach: still local hardware but not ASIC based. (ASICs are typically more power efficient than FPGA-based products but need a substantial capital investment in the first place, and that means vendors need guaranteed high sales volume to recover their investment.)
H.264 is the most widespread codec globally, and has been for many years. In some industries, like CCTV, other codecs, like HEVC, are changing the market. In digital signage, H.264 has been more resilient but, whilst still the leader, declining nonetheless. That is our second lesson: We can’t safely nail our colors to the mast of a single codec.
Putting the two ideas together—buyers should be looking for solutions that have a roadmap that they identify with. If they are currently using H.264, are they thinking about HEVC, VP9, AV1 or some other in the future? Do the AV/IT products that they are thinking about—software or hardware—give them the flexibility to change their mind?
