Allegro DVT introduces real-time AV1 encoder IP for 4K/UHD video

Thursday, April 18th, 2019
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Allegro DVT Introduces the Industry First Real-Time AV1 Video Encoder Hardware IP for 4K/UHD Video Encoding Applications

GRENOBLE, France — Allegro DVT, a leading provider of video semiconductor IP solutions, today announced the availability of its AL-E210 multi-format video encoder hardware IP which adds support for the new AV1 video format developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia).

AOMedia was formed in 2015 by industry leaders such as Google, Netflix, Intel, Microsoft with the charter to provide an open-source, royalty-free alternative to H.265/HEVC and other standards while improving the compression rate and delivering the same video quality at lower bitrate. Allegro DVT joined AOMedia in the early phase and has been an active member contributing to the AV1 video format development.

The AL-E210 is the first video encoder IP to implement real-time and file-based encoding in AV1 format up to 4K/UHD resolutions. Built upon a true multi-format architecture, it provides support for H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9 and JPEG by sharing resources between the five supported codecs to achieve best-in-class trade-offs between silicon area, system memory bandwidth and power consumption.

“Hardware acceleration of AV1 encoding is critical to ensure real-time performance and encoding density, our new AL-E210 is the ideal solution that will help our customers to bring to market world-class encoding chipsets to ensure rapid adoption of the AV1 codec format by the industry,” commented Nouar Hamze, CEO of Allegro DVT.

The AL-E210 also builds on the proven Allegro DVT multi-core architecture which offers flexibility to achieve different performance levels to match the requirements of the target application. This innovative architecture provides options to higher picture resolutions such as 8K and higher frame rates up to 120fps.

The AL-E210 inherits all the smart encoding features from previous Allegro DVT encoder products, such as preprocessing and noise reduction filters, automatic detection of Regions Of Interest (ROI) in source pictures and ultra-low latency encoding. Furthermore, the AL-E210 embeds various caching and compression mechanisms to lower the memory bandwidth requirements which become a critical system level issue with increasing video resolutions and frame rates.