Video: CDN Trends in FPGAs & GPUs

As technology continues to improve, immersive experiences are all the more feasible. This video looks at how the CDNs can play their part in enabling technologies which seem to rely on fast, local, compute. However, as with many internet services, low latency is very important.

Greg Jones from Nvidia and Nehal Mehta form Intel give us the lowdown in this video on what’s happening today to enable low-latency CDNs and what the future might look like. Intel, owners of FPGA makers Altera, and Nvidia are both interested in how their products can be of as much service at the edge as in the core datacentres.

Greg is involved in XR development at Nvidia. ‘XR’ is a term which refers to an outcome rather than any specific technology. Ostensibly ‘eXtended’ reality, it includes some VR, some augmented reality and anything else which helps improve the immersive experience. Greg explains that the importance of getting the ‘motion to photon’ delay to within 20ms. CDNs can play a role in this by moving compute to the edge. This tracks with current trends on wanting to reduce backhaul, edge computation is already on the rise.

Greg also touches on recent power improvements on newer GPUs. Similar to what we heard the other day from Gerard Phillips from Arista who said that switch manufacturers were still using technology that CPU’s were on several years ago meaning there’s plenty in the bank for speed increases over the coming years. According to Greg, the same is true for GPUs. Moreover, it’s important to compare compute per watt rather than doing it in absolute terms.

Nehal Mehta explains that, in the same way that GPUs can offload certain tasks from the CPU, so do FPGAs. At scale, this can be critical for tasks like deep packet inspection, encryption or even dynamic ad insertion at the edge,

The second half of video looks at what’s happening during the pandemic. Nehal explains that need for encryption has increased and Greg sees that large engineering functions are now, or many are soon likely to be, done in the cloud. Greg sees XR as going a long way to helping people collaborate around a large digital model and may help to reduce travel.

The last point made is regarding video conferencing all day long leaving people wanting “more meaningful interactions”. We are seeing attempts at richer and richer meeting experiences, both with and without XR.
Watch now!
Speakers

Greg Jones Greg Jones
Global Business Development, XR
NVIDIA
Nehal Mehta Nehal Mehta
Direcotr Visiual Cloud, CDN Segment,
Intel
Tim Siglin Moderator: Tim Siglin
Founding Executive Director,
Help Me Stream

Video: AV1 – A Reality Check

Released in 2018, AV1 had been a little over two years in the making at the Alliance of Open Media founded by industry giants including Google, Amazon, Mozilla, Netflix. Since then work has continued to optimise the toolset to bring both encoding and decoding down to real-world levels.

This talk brings together AOM members Mozilla, Netflix, Vimeo and Bitmovin to discus where AV1’s up to and to answer questions from the audience. After some introductions, the conversation turns to 8K. The Olympics are the broadcast industry’s main driver for 8K at the moment, though it’s clear that Japan and other territories aim to follow through with further deployments and uses.

“AV1 is the 8K codec of choice” 

Paul MacDougall, Bitmovin
 CES 2020 saw a number of announcements like this from Samsung regarding AV1-enabled 8K TVs. In this talk from Google, Matt Frost from Google Chrome Media explains how YouTube has found that viewer retention is higher with VP9-delivered videos which he attributes to VP9’s improved compression over AVC which leads to quicker start times, less buffering and, often, a higher resolution being delivered to the user. AV1 is seen as providing these same benefits over AVC without the patent problems that come with HEVC.

 
It’s not all about resolution, however, points out Paul MacDougall from BitMovin. Resolution can be useful, for instance in animations. For animated content, resolution is worth having because it accentuates the lines which add intelligibility to the picture. For some content, with many similar textures, grass, for instance, then quality through bitrate may be more useful than adding resolution. Vittorio Giovara from Vimeo agrees, pointing out that viewer experience is a combination of many factors. Though it’s trivial to say that a high-resolution screen of unintended black makes for a bad experience, it is a great reminder of things that matter. Less obviously, Vittorio highlights the three pillars of spatial, temporal and spectral quality. Temporal refers to upping the bitrate, spatial is, indeed, the resolution and spectral refers to bit-depth and colour-depth know as HDR and Wide Colour Gamut (WCG).

Nathan Egge from Mozilla acknowledges that in their 2018 code release at NAB, the unoptimized encoder which was claimed by some to be 3000 times slower than HEVC, was ’embarrassing’, but this is the price of developing in the open. The panel discusses the fact that the idea of developing compression is to try out approaches until you find a combination that work well. While you are doing that, it would be a false economy to be constantly optimising. Moreover, Netflix’s Anush Moorthy points out, it’s a different set of skills and, therefore, a different set of people who optimise the algorithms.

Questions fielded by the panel cover whether there are any attempts to put AV1 encoding or decoding into GPU. Power consumption and whether TVs will have hardware or software AV1 decoding. Current in-production AV1 uses and AVC vs VVC (compression benefit Vs. royalty payments).

Watch now!
Speakers

Vittorio Giovara Vittorio Giovara
Manager, Engineering – Video Technology
Vimeo
Nathan Egge Nathan Egge
Video Codec Engineer,
Mozilla
Paul MacDougall Paul MacDougall
Principal Sales Engineer,
Bitmovin
Anush Moorthy Anush Moorthy
Manager, Video and Image Encoding
Netflix
Tim Siglin Tim Siglin
Founding Executive Director
Help Me Stream, USA

Video: Get Ready For A Multiple Codec World

The codec world is fragmenting. None of the new entrants on to the market is expected to ever gain the universal status that AVC enjoys. This panel from Streaming Media East takes a look at how to prepare for this.

The panel kicks off discussing the differences between AVC and HEVC, VP9 and AV1 and moves on to discuss the pros and cons of supporting multiple codecs. Tarek from Twitch explains its partial adoption of VP9 – the reasons that it makes sense but the overheads which it brings the business.

Vittorio Giovara from Vimeo explains their reasons for using HEVC including their drive to be able to encode and deliver 10-bit video. Ellation’s Subhrendu Sarakar makes the point that managing codec changes and bitrate changes needs to be done carefully to ensure viewers that notice the change understand them and don’t feel there has been a reduction of quality.

After a brief discussion of encoding strongly characterised video types such as anime and gaming, the conversation moves on to AV1 and migrating from VP9 and there is an audience question on HEVC licensing and the lack of use of SVC (Scalable Video Coding)

It’s now relatively well known that Twitch deployed VP9 using FPGAs rather than as a software encoder which was the only way to get the real-time speed at 1080p60. The panel discusses encoding speed both in the encoder and decoder for VP9 and AV1 then finishes with a Q&A from the audience.

Watch now!

Speakers

Tim Siglin Tim Siglin
Founding Executive Director
Help Me! Stream
Tarek Amara Tarek Amara
Principal Video Specialist,
Twitch
Vittorio Giovara Vittorio Giovara
Senior Engineer, Video Encoding
Vimeo
Nathan Egge Nathan Egge
Video Codec Engineer,
Mozilla
Subhrendu Sarkar Subhrendu Sarkar
Senior Engineering Manager, Video Infrastructure & CMS,
Ellation