Amazon Web Services has launched Amazon EC2 VT1 instances, which it says will make live multi-stream video transcoding with resolutions up to 4K UHD easier and more cost effective.
The release is designed to tap into a growing wave of content creators and live broadcasters looking to capitalise on the burgeoning demand for video content and to help them deliver great image quality without sacrificing reliability or paying a hefty price tag, said AWS.
Amazon EC2 VT1 instances features Xilinx U30 media transcoding cards with accelerated H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC codecs, and can offer price reductions per stream of 35-per cent or more compared with Amazon EC2 GPU instances, which the company said are best suited for graphics-intensive applications.
Amazon EC2 VT1 instances feature networking interfaces of up to 25 Gbps that can ingest multiple video streams over IP with low latency and low jitter, which AWS said make it possible for customers with broadcast and streaming video pipelines to fully embrace scalable, cost effective, and resilient infrastructure.
The instances are available in three sizes, all of which can transcode multiple streams per instance. Streams can be processed independently in parallel or mixed (picture-in-picture, side-by-side, transitions).
Additionally, the instances can help with implementing colour correction, watermarking, titling, audio normalisation, graphics overlay, or colour space conversion, as well as simultaneously output multiple streams at different resolutions (1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p) and in both H.264 and H.265.