Kulabyte shipping new HD encoding system

By Ken Kerschbaumer

Kulabyte is now shipping what it calls the industry’s fastest video encoding system: Kulabyte Professional Version 1.0. The product effectively presents a new paradigm for video encoding, as it is the first to leverage multi-core video processing, enabling professionals to deliver cross-platform content with noticeably improved picture quality and bandwidth savings.

The Kulabyte Professional Encoder is based on the company’s unique, patent-pending TimeSlice video encoding technology, which enables faster-than-real-time video encoding while utilizing industry standard codec engines.

“TimeSlice technology is a radical approach to handling video,” says Chris Gottschalk, the founder and CTO of Kulabyte. “It provides the freedom to use modern codecs to their full potential, no matter what the intended purpose of the final video stream.

Gottschalk says the easiest way to understand how it works is to take a look at how the system handles live video.

“Normally, when encoding LIVE video you are forced to use one-pass CBR and a bare minimum of codec settings in order to maintain real-time,” he says. “The consequence of live codec settings is that quality is noticeably worse than file based encodes. Kulabyte’s solution is to treat the live stream like you would a file; so each incoming TimeSlice is treated like a file allowing for any codec parameter and mode to be used, so essentially you can do a live two-pass VBR on a LIVE stream, an industry first with standard codecs. On a file-based encode, TimeSlice’s can be spread out amongst multiple processor cores to enable full processor utilization, even on single threaded codecs.”

Kulabyte offers a 30-day trial period for the Kulabyte Professional Release 1.0 product, and will be priced at $5,500.00 for the standard 4-core version with optional VP6 for Flash 8 support for $1,500.00 more.

“The ubiquity of Flash video requires a faster-than-real-time, reliable platform for video encoding, and Kulabyte Professional Encoding Suite now delivers a faster, more efficient solution for the greatest number of video professionals,” said Chris Gottschalk, co-founder and chief technology officer for Kulabyte. “This initial commercial version of our Kulabyte Professional Encoding Suite is an answer to the universal issue of video encoding lags.”