Modulus Video this week unveiled its new ME6000, a real-time full resolution HD encoder for broadcast and other video applications. The new system will enable satellite, telco and cable (and particularly new IP-based TV services), to provide consumers with the visual impact of HD, while using the least amount of bandwidth.
The ME6000 is an HD MPEG-4 AVC encoding platform with processing power of more than 600 billion operations per second (which is needed to encode full resolution HD). Modulus Video said the new encoder will deliver HD at about half the bit rate of existing MPEG-2 systems, which means it can deliver twice as many channels over existing MPEG-2 infrastructure.
The company said that given the bandwidth-efficient nature of its new HD encoder that does not sacrifice video or audio quality, it's providing a practical distribution route for HD content delivery for a growing number of distributors. The ME6000 has the ability to support advanced features such as CABAC entropy coding (CABAC is "context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding"), macro block adaptive field-frame coding, multi-frame references, and a de-blocking filter as part of its AVC video compression platform. The platform delivers MPEG-4 AVC data as a compressed MPEG-2 transport stream using IP or optional ASI, making it easy to deploy into an existing video delivery system.
Modulus Video will offer live demos at NAB2005 (Booth C11416). The ME6000 is expected to ship this summer.
