The possibilities of 8K virtual reality live streaming are being discussed on the Advantech stand, with a showcase of the VR capabilities of the company’s
Vega-3304 encoding accelerator.
Advantech said its Vega-3304 is the first commercial off-the-shelf accelerator to support single-channel 8Kp60 or 4-channel 4Kp60 real-time HEVC Main 10 contribution-grade encoding with SDI acquisition. “360° VR solution providers can use the VEGA-3304 to build compact, high-quality VR live encoders that accelerate the next wave of innovation in the media industry,” claimed Advantech.
VR has the potential to fully transform viewers’ experience but real mass adoption is likely to be subject to providing lifelike quality live content, stated Advantech, adding that this poses many infrastructure challenges.
“After stitching, a 360° video can surpass even 8K resolution and the quality of viewer experience will depend on keeping a high resolution throughout the contribution stages. Bandwidth optimisation is crucial to carry this back to the central distribution processing elements over existing networks, so HEVC plays a key role on VR live streaming enablement,” noted Advantech.
However, the potential computational load of multiple 4K or even 8K HEVC encoding is a significant hurdle to overcome in real world deployments.
Emily Teng, Vega video adapters product line manager, Advantech, said:
“The Vega-3304 makes significant progress on off-the-shelf available processing acceleration. Its impressive encoding quality combined with its unrivalled 8K capacity provides a powerfultool to VR developers, [who] now have a straightforward plug-in accelerator to deal with 360° video processing struggles.”
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