V-Nova releases LCEVC Native Development Kit for video SoCs and ASICs

V-Nova announces LCEVC NDK for Video SOCs and ASICs

LONDON, UK — V-Nova, a leading provider of video compression solutions, today announced the availability of V-Nova LCEVC Native Development Kit (NDK) to accelerate the implementation and deployment of MPEG-5 LCEVC encoding and decoding on Video system-on-chip (SOC) and dedicated ASICs.

MPEG-5 LCEVC (ISO/IEC 23094-2) is the first enhancement standard from MPEG, delivering better quality at up to 40% lower bandwidth, faster transcoding times, reduced costs for storage and content delivery. MPEG-5 LCEVC is an innovative standard that enhances any ‘base’ codec, including AVC/h.264, HEVC/h.265 and AV1 with no requirement to replace them.

Today’s announcement adds a Native Development Kit to V-Nova’s generally available SDK. V-Nova LCEVC NDK is a collection of tools to enable Operating System, Browsers, Video SOC vendors and video ASIC vendors to quickly add LCEVC capabilities to their roadmap, with implementations ranging from full-software to full-silicon.

The LCEVC NDK tools include a ready-to-deploy set of libraries for encoding and decoding LCEVC enhancement on CPU and GPU, reference designs for the composition of the video ‘base’ layer and the LCEVC enhancement using the hardware blocks available in modern SOCs, as well as a full ASIC IP block ready to be dropped in new designs. Reference integrations include Chromium, WebRTC, OpenMAX, drivers of existing SOCs and an FPGA implementation of the ASIC IP RTL (register transfer logic).

The low-complexity nature of LCEVC allows vendors in different parts of the video ecosystem to deploy LCEVC encoding and decoding capabilities natively across different levels in a technology stack, from HTML5 capable players, software-only in applications and now natively in operating systems and on silicon.

Moreover, given the novel licensing model of MPEG-5 LCEVC, the V-Nova LCEVC NDK is available free of charge to Browser, Operating System, Video SOC and ASIC vendors, with service providers due a small and capped fee.

“We’re very excited to announce an LCEVC Native Development Kit to supplement the already-available SDK. We believe this will help ecosystem vendors across a multitude of application to accelerate their roadmap for deployment of MPEG-5 LCEVC” said Guido Meardi, CEO and co-founder at V-Nova. “LCEVC has been already deployed in software – at application level and scripted in HTML5 browsers – but does not necessarily mean ‘software only’ and now we are ready to help vendors across the whole technology stack to help deploy LCEVC as easily and efficiently as possible.”