Sorenson Media Selects Aspex
Sorenson Media Selects Aspex To Power Sorenson SqueezeHD XCE
11th May, 2006,
Sorenson Media has chosen Aspex processors to power Sorenson Media's new high performance Sorenson SqueezeHD XCEL™ video compression suite.
Sorenson SqueezeHD XCEL is a new hardware-accelerated platform for video compression, targeted at power users of video compression, such as studios and broadcast facilities, who require high quality HD video compression in real-time or faster than real-time. The solution combines the high quality video compression and ease-of-use of Sorenson Media's award-winning Sorenson Squeeze software encoding engine with the ultra-high performance image processing of Aspex's Linedancer Extreme Processors, giving users significant productivity uplift.
At the heart of the system is an Aspex Accelera PCI-X card, integrating more than 16,000 software-programmable processing elements, allowing tens of thousands of pixels to be processed in a single clock cycle. When integrated with Sorenson SqueezeHD XCEL, the Aspex processors accelerate the performance-intensive video compression tasks, such as motion estimation and intra prediction.
Sorenson SqueezeHD XCEL includes the industries widest selection of software video encoders plus hardware accelerated support for the industry-standard MPEG-2 encoder. The hardware platform is 100% software programmable, providing a future road map to H.264 and VC1 acceleration with the same hardware. It has also been designed to integrate seamlessly with video capture cards from Avid, BlueFish and other vendors.
"Sorenson Squeeze is the leading desktop video compression application on the market and we are delighted to be working with Sorenson Media to accelerate the product for users that require high volumes of HD content. Sorenson Squeeze sets the benchmark for quality and ease-of-use and the combination with Aspex's high performance, software-programmable video compression accelerators is a natural fit. Both Sorenson Media and Aspex see an increasing need to support multiple different video compression standards in the HD workflow, such as MPEG-2, H.264 and VC1. The philosophical commitment to software programmability is at the heart of our partnership." Paul Greenfield, CEO, Aspex Semiconductor.
"We partnered with Aspex because of demand from our customer base for faster HD video encoding than software alone can provide. Customers like the quality and simplicity of Sorenson Squeeze in a single workstation but even the latest multi-processor systems can't achieve real-time encoding without significantly compromising quality. Fixed function hardware doesn't fit with the multi-format flexibility our customers expect from Sorenson Squeeze. Aspex was the partner of choice because of the flexible software upgrade path to H.264, VC1 and other format encoding that they could provide, allowing us to harness future performance improvements and continue to deliver high value, futureproof solutions to our customers." Matt Cupal, President and COO, Sorenson Media.
Sorenson SqueezeHD XCEL is being offered by Sorenson's reseller network as part of a turnkey system which also includes a high-end workstation, and optional video capture cards.