Bolt65 – performance-optimized HEVC HW/SW suite for Just-in-Time video processing

This paper presents Bolt65 HEVC software/hardware suite, consisting of encoder, decoder and transcoder, that is being developed at Faculty of electrical engineering and computing, University of Zagreb. One of the primary focus of Bolt65 is achieving Just-in-Time requirements that would enable video encoding/transcoding on demand. To achieve this goal, Bolt65 tries to maximally utilize all software and hardware components of the system on different architectures, from homogeneous CPU architectures with vector extensions to heterogeneous, accelerator-based architectures that have different types of processing cores. CPU-only implementation of Bolt65 was compared with referent HM HEVC software in three different encoding configurations: All Intra (AI), Low delay (LD) and Random Access (RA). Results show that Bolt65 achieves significant speed-up in all configurations and bitrate savings in AI and RA modes while sacrificing quality in order to achieve just-in-time requirements.

I. Introduction

Statistics show that Global video IP traffic will be 82 percent of all consumer Internet traffic by 2022, up from 75 percent in 2017. The annual global IP traffic will reach 4.8 ZB (ZB=1000 Exabytes) by 2022, 3.9 ZB of which will be video content [1]. Handling this enormous amount of data is a very challenging task for the video content providers in years to come. Another factor that highlights this problem is the fact that a range of different devices that can play video content is constantly growing. With such diversity of devices, that have different decoding capabilities, computing resources, network bandwidths, and resolutions, a single copy of the encoded video cannot match requirements of all devices.