Slashing CAPEX, OPEX, & energy rates using the latest ‘green’ video encoding technologies

By Max Owen, Director of Sales Engineering EMEA at MediaKind

The adoption of real-time streaming experiences such as live events, interactive video, cloud gaming, video communications, and virtual worlds is soaring. Meeting this demand with CPU-based codecs can often be expensive and inefficient, unnecessarily boosting CAPEX, OPEX, and carbon emissions generated by CPU based encoding. In a breakthrough for the video processing sector, organisations can tap into GPU-based solutions that substantially trim down operating costs, capital expenditure, and energy usage. This innovation ensures the delivery of top-notch picture quality and optimizes rack density while offering a user-friendly experience. This development highlights our industry’s commitment to meeting the most stringent environmental, social, and governance (ESG) benchmarks and supporting everyone in helping to reduce their carbon footprint.

GPU vs. CPU

The task of video encoding is notorious for its massive power consumption, often taking up to a third of a data centre’s computing power. Until now, it’s been a significant challenge to ensure optimal performance quality without skyrocketing costs and CO2 emissions. However, GPU-based solutions propose an efficient approach that optimises energy usage and significantly reduces emissions during the video streaming process.

A series of tests comparing GPU and CPU-based encoding found that the GPU solution could liberate main CPUs for other tasks while achieving an impressive 70% energy savings on average.

Three separate scenarios were tested for efficiency, with three different profile sets: The HD OTT scenario comprised five different resolutions, 60 and 30 frames per second (fps) rates, and H.264 codecs. Bitrates ranged from 200kbps for 320x180 to 5Mbps for 1920x1080HD. The UHD OTT profile had a frame rate of 60 fps and HEVC codec at 16Mbps, and the broadcast/IPTV profiles with two resolutions - HD at 7.5Mbps, and SD 2.5Mbps MPEG-2, at 30fps:

Scenario 1: CPU vs, GPU for HD OTT with 5 profiles

Running with a CPU only model required 4 standard servers to handle the 16 HD channels with their associated profiles. When the GPU based solution was used (including the servers CPU capability), the server count fell to just one server.

This meant a drop in the average power consumption per channel from 138W to 40w a 71% reduction

Scenario 2: CPU vs, GPU for UHD with 1 profile

In this scenario, each UHD channel typically requires a whole server to encode one channel. However with the GPU solution installed, the same server could then manage 5 channels. The power consumption per channel therefore dropped 76% (488w vs 115w)

Scenario 3: CPU vs, GPU for Broadcast (2 profiles)

Finally, running a broadcast HD and SD version of the same services in a single server delivered 12 channels per unit, a huge 48 channels HD AND SD channels could be ran in one server with the GPU cards added – with power use per channel 71% lower by comparison.

Results also found that the technology achieves reductions of about 65% for the encoding servers, making it ideal for businesses looking to optimise their data centre infrastructure. Using less power – by an average of almost 75% vs CPU-only in each scenario – the equivalent power per channel metric was as low as 13W for an IPTV HD channel (30FPS) and 78W for a UHD OTT profile (60FPS) – it reduces cooling requirements and associated costs as well. The carbon dioxide saved versus the CPU-only version was also an average 54 tonnes across the three GPU-accelerator combinations tested.

GPU-based solutions fully support the H.264 and HEVC codecs and do not require any complex implementation for customers to deploy them. Companies can bring their own servers, so there is no reliance on bespoke hardware either. The solution can be deployed on their own servers, and the channels can be managed from the same interface with the same licensing model.

To sum up, we can see that environmentally friendly video encoding is essential for the sustainability of the streaming industry. GPU-based video encoding technology offers a way to reduce the carbon footprint of video streaming while also providing significant cost savings for content providers.