MainConcept Speeds MPEG-4 AVC Transcoding with CUDA

MainConcept GmbH announced a new NVIDIA CUDA-based H.264/AVC plug-in for MainConcept’s Reference 2.1 stand-alone transcoding application as well as a Codec Suite 5 plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 that offers H.264/AVC encoding from the timeline, with full CUDA hardware acceleration.

For more information visit: www.mainconcept.com


Unedited press release follows:

MainConcept Announces Two New H.264/AVC Video Transcoding Technologies Accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs With CUDA Technology

Allows Creative Professionals and Developers to Further Harness the GPU power of over 200 Million NVIDIA GPUs to Deliver Significantly Faster Video Encoding and Lower CPU Utilization.

AACHEN, Germany, Sept. 9 — MainConcept GmbH, a wholly-owned subsidiary of DivX, Inc. (Nasdaq: DIVX) and one of the world’s premier providers of video and audio codecs and software development kits (SDKs) for the consumer, broadcast and professional markets, announced today the release of new H.264/AVC encoding technologies, which allow creative professionals and software developers to encode video into the immensely popular H.264/AVC format. By offloading many of the processor intensive video encoding tasks from the CPU to NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs), the MainConcept H.264/AVC Encoder provides up to 10x faster performance for HD video compared with CPU-only encoding and reduces CPU utilization to as low as 20%, freeing up the system for other computing tasks. Two new MainConcept H.264/AVC Encoding technologies, built on the NVIDIA CUDA™ massively parallel computing architecture, are now available:

* New CUDA-based H.264/AVC plug-in for MainConcept’s popular Reference 2.1 stand-alone transcoding application for Windows® and Macintosh®, which provides production houses a fast solution for the transcoding of many formats into H.264/AVC, with pre-sets for popular playback devices including iPod/iPhone/iPad, PSP, Blu-ray Disc, and others.

* New Codec Suite 5 plug-in for Adobe® Premiere Pro CS5 that offers H.264/AVC encoding from the timeline, with full CUDA hardware acceleration, so video editors can finish their projects faster.

Additionally, MainConcept’s CUDA H.264/AVC SDK, shipping since June 2010, enables developers to add GPU accelerated video encoding to their own applications.

The MainConcept CUDA H.264/AVC Encoder improves performance by using NVIDIA GPU acceleration for encoding/transcoding. It enables transcoding from MPEG-2, VC-1 and AVC elementary streams or raw frames into H.264/AVC Baseline and Main profiles. MainConcept’s CUDA H.264/AVC encoding solutions work seamlessly with the 200+ million NVIDIA graphics solutions supporting the CUDA architecture, including NVIDIA Quadro, Tesla and GeForce, product lines.

“Video professionals and developers alike understand that time is money and thus being able to encode video faster into H.264/AVC, the premier format for the next decade, is paramount,” said Muzaffer Beygirci, managing director, MainConcept. “We have spent considerable effort optimizing our H.264/AVC technology offerings to take full advantage of the NVIDIA CUDA architecture and GPU acceleration, and continue to offer video professionals and developers this dramatically accelerated video encoding with MainConcept quality and compatibility baked right in.”

“MainConcept’s CUDA-based H.264/AVC video encoding solutions really showcase the incredible power of the GPU that NVIDIA offers,” said Andrew Cresci, general manager, vertical market solutions, NVIDIA. “These latest, CUDA-based H.264/AVC encoding technologies are excellent solutions for developers and video professionals who are under constant pressure to produce high quality products in less time.”

The MainConcept H.264/AVC encoder SDK and the Codec Suite 5 H.264/AVC encoder plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 are all available today from the MainConcept online shop at www.mainconcept.com and are compatible with any NVIDIA graphics solution supporting the CUDA compute capability 1.0 or higher. For a complete list, please visit: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_gpus.html. The MainConcept H.264/AVC plug-in for Reference 2.1 will be available shortly.

Attending IBC 2010 in Amsterdam? Please schedule a meeting with your MainConcept sales professional or simply drop by the MainConcept booth 2. C50, to see a demonstration of our new CUDA accelerated H.264/AVC encoding solutions in addition to the rest of MainConcept’s renown audio and video codec products.

About MainConcept
MainConcept GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary of DivX, Inc. (NASDAQ: DIVX), is one of the world’s premier providers of high-quality audio and video codec solutions for consumer and professional applications. Many of the world’s best consumer electronics and computer manufacturers, handheld device makers, and creative software providers rely on MainConcept embedded codec solutions to deliver a superb audio and video experience to their customers, in virtually all popular consumer formats. MainConcept also provides comprehensive encoding and decoding solutions to the broadcast and professional video industry in the form of codecs for integration into creative software suites as well as complete after-market plug-in solutions for adding new video format support into popular Non-Linear Editing (NLE) software packages. We are MainConcept – The Codec People.