HOW IT WORKS

Elemental has harnessed the power of modern graphics processing units (GPU) and other massively parallel chips for video processing.  GPUs are microprocessors inside every computer that handle graphic processing for image display on the screen and  for 3D games. Until the introduction of Elemental’s breakthrough technology, there was no way to use the massively parallel processing power of GPUs for video decoding, encoding, and transcoding.

Demonstration Video

Traditionally, video processing technologies have used central processing units (CPUs), digital signal processing (DSP), or other specialized integrated circuits. When a video is processed with these technologies, each frame is broken into individual macroblocks that are processed one at a time. Because GPUs enable parallel processing, all the macroblocks in a frame can be processed concurrently. As a result, GPUs and other chips with a massively parallel architecture are a much more efficient way to process video.

The Elemental video engine unlocks the power of massively parallel chips like GPUs for video processing. This provides a range of benefits including lower costs, faster encoding/transcoding, and better utilization of system resources. For example, if you’re encoding on a PC, you can continue to use your computer (with the CPU) for other work while a video is being encoded on your GPU.

For enterprise-class video processing with HD and broadcast quality video, GPU-based video encoding/transcoding has other advantages. It can be done with commodity equipment, which eliminates the need for expensive proprietary hardware. The greater efficiency means the solutions have much higher density in the data center, reducing space, energy, and cooling requirements, again lowering costs without sacrificing quality. Finally, the massively parallel processing architecture makes it much easier to handle the intense computation requirements of HD video. 

We’ve taken the core Elemental video engine and incorporated it into a wide range of products that meet the needs of different segments of the market.