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October 9, 2020

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Flussonic unveils its transcoder motherboard

Flussonic has unveiled its Lontra motherboard for its video transcoders. The company gives us the lowdown.

As frequent readers are aware, last year Erlyvideo announced plans to develop its own hardware transcoder. The most difficult part of this exciting journey, but at the same time the most rewarding, was the development of the motherboard for the transcoder.

Erlyvideo is proud to present its Lontra motherboard, a custom carrier board for 9 NVidia Jetson TX2 modules. This affordable solution can breach the gap between home-brew transcoders built on standard X86 components with open-source video processing software and enterprise video processing solutions.

It is no secret to anyone that all IPTV and OTT providers want a carrier-grade solution with exceptional quality of uninterrupted video. It is also known that the online video streaming industry is experiencing exponential growth (today there are 1,200 independent telecom and cable operators in the US alone) and that it demands a scalable, robust and affordable carrier-grade solution in high volumes. At present, Lontra ranks among the best solutions on the market to meet those needs, both in terms of quality and cost.

Over its many years in the industry, Erlyvideo has effectively developed and marketed software-based transcoders and collected enough feedback from its customers – feedback that has resulted in the creation of Lontra.

One of the most common customer complaints is that transcoding video is a computationally-intensive process and that building a transcoder using traditional components (GPU, CPU or ASIC) can be a very expensive journey. Also, the fact that in CPU-based transcoders all transmissions are being processed in one loop by a single CPU creates a single point of failure, something that can cause loss of service during the time it takes to repair the issue.

Flussonic-Lontra-20With Lontra, if something goes wrong with one of the Jetsons, it would affect only one out of nine of the streams in the system. The software handles these types of malfunctions very well, and in most cases the transcoding session can be restarted without dropping a single frame, improving the quality and robustness of video transcoding.

The modular system makes it possible to configure the N+1 redundancy scheme allocating one or more Jetson modules as back-ups and configuring the failover mechanism. One Jetson module can process up to eight linear FHD streams or up to six multi-bitrate streams. The granularity enables customers to add new modules to their systems as their channel line-up increases.

Another very common customer concern is how expensive it is to pay for a staff of trained engineers to operate a transcoder. This cost, in many companies, can go up to $100,000 annually in salaries alone. In response to this concern, Erlyvideo has developed a hardware transcoder that is maintenance-free, reducing customers’ expenses associated with hiring specialized personnel to run it.

Speaking of cost management, the new transcoder boasts a remarkably low total energy consumption of just 100W so that customers can scale their business without adding to their electricity bills. Lower power consumption means that with Lontra there will be way less heat to evacuate because when Jetson is utilised for transcoding video only, the maximum consumption per module is 11W, which brings the total power draw of the system to only 100W.

Erlyvideo has successfully translated its many years of experience in software development into a transparent, reliable and energy-efficient hardware platform.

The transcoder will be made commercially available under the OPEX (operating expenses) model. This means that customers can “pay-as-they-grow” instead of buying everything at once.

Find out more information about the new product via the company’s blog posts or email [email protected].

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