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 Harmonic, a California-based provider of IP-based digital video and broadband edge and access solutions, reportedly announced that it will start providing a new transcoding technology, so called ‘Agile (News - Alert) Compression Engine,’ on the company’s ProStream 1000 Stream Processing platform.

The availability of this new technology will not only extend the functionality of ProStream 1000 sets, but will also provide industry-leading density for MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 AVC and MPEG-4 to MPEG-2 transcoding. This will redefine video delivery, says company.

Harmonic’s (News - Alert) ProStream 1000 is a solution for a variety of stream processing needs, such as scrambling/descrambling, re-encoding, transcoding, statistical multiplexing, forward error correction, variable to constant bit-rate conversion and single frequency network transmission over IP.

According to Harmonic, ACE is a scalable IP-based transcoder that supports a number of applications, such as real-time transcoding for digital turnaround, mobile video, Internet TV, and digital program or even advertisement insertion.

Moreover, the new ACE technology can transcode up to 20 high definition or 80 standard definition video and audio channels in a compact and power-efficient one rack-unit chassis.

Officials at Harmonic said that the existing ProStream 1000 systems can be easily field-upgradeable to support the new ACE functionality.

Harmonic’s ProStream 1000 with ACE technology offers few enhanced features, such as “Any-to-Any” transcoding and “Any-to-Many” transcoding. The platform as a whole can now transcode any combination of MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC, HD, SD, and numerous audio codecs, including HD to SD down-conversion. Even multiple output streams per input service is facilitated, in order to simultaneously support broadcast digital simulcast/triplecast, switched digital video and video-on-demand services.

In addition, the ProStream 1000 with ACE provides enhanced audio processing including transcoding and level adjustment. Support for mixed statistical multiplex pools of transcoded and encoded services are also offered with company’s market-leading DiviTrack statistical multiplexing. 

Harmonic said that it will enhance the ProStream 1000 sets with company’s IRIS software, in order to offer integrated automatic audio level adjustment along with quality of service monitoring and optimization.

 “Cable operators deploying ACE can create multiple versions of video from the same input source, such as HD and SD versions or constant bit-rate formats for time-shifted TV,” Yaniv Ben-Shushan, product marketing manager for Harmonic, said in a statement. “Operators using hybrid network architectures can transport MPEG-4 content over satellite or IP and transcode at the edge, reducing the number of decode/re-encode steps and preserving higher video quality. Telco video service providers can reliably and cost-effectively transcode from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 for delivery of the channel lineup over the IPTV (News - Alert) network.”