IBC 2022 - MainConcept shows VVC encoder 8K in the Cloud

Chris Chinnock for the 8K Monitor. It's IBC 2022 and I am in the MainConcept booth where we're looking at some of their latest encoding demonstrations. In this demonstration we're looking at live VVC encoding. So what's unique about MainConcept is not that they can encode 8K in the cloud, but that they're actually generating three different streams from the same instance. In this case it's a 4K/60p, a 1080/60p and a 720/30p all running from the same AWS instance. In this case it looks like it's an EC2 C6a instance. I haven't looked up all the details, but as I understand, it's a 192 core AMD Epyc processor. They're able to do all these things live on that single processor. Now what's also interesting is the cost of this, which is far lower than I would have expected. So for example, if you run it on a Linux box it's seven dollars an hour but using a Windows O/S is 15 dollars an hour. If you're going to spin up VVC for a special event for example, that's a very modest cost and you can get these three streams out of this as well. This is all done in a dash encode and streamed with 10-bits. What they're displaying in this display is the the 1080p version.

Another interesting tidbit is that the LG TV has a VVC decoder built in, as we saw at the ATEME booth, but you need a special firmware update. It's not publicly available if you buy this TV in the store. And that firmware update does not support Dash live encoding with VVC nor does the Fraunhofer decoder. So that's why MainConcept had to build a special decoder to do that over here.

What we're looking at here is basically the same demo that they showed at NAB about six months ago. This is the same sort of idea but now this is 8K/60p plus a 4K plus a 720p. Again, three streams from one AMD-based Amazon instance with that AMD epyc processor for 8K. I think this is the only company that can actually do three simultaneous streams from one instance. Again, a great way to spin up for an 8K demo or whatever.

In this third area is the essential ingredients they're talking about - what they call their content creation lab. They showed me a number of different pieces of capabilities that they develop here. MainConcept provides a bunch of plugins for editing tools on an OEM basis to companies like Adobe. This includes all kinds of output formats and encoding options that they can provide. They also provide a number of plugins for ffmpeg to increase its capabilities that now support a bunch of new output formats that would typically be in a more sophisticated editing platform. So that's what some of this information here is talking about.

A second area that they're talking about is the release of their VVC encoder SDK that will be out soon. It will allow you to play with various parameters - see all these coding parameters are adjustable as well as structure parameters. This is something that customers can start to download soon and be able to do some VVC encoding demos and trials. They also support a number of major camera encoding workflow systems Sony's X-AVC and Panasonic's AVC workflow is something that they also support with plugins and encoding. So that's pretty much the story from MainConcept. Chris Chinnock for the 8K Monitor

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