Capella Systems announces enhanced automated VOD/Live transcoding solutions at NAB 2024

New cloud workflows Capella recently introduced its Cambria transcoding engine to cloud and hybrid workflows while still retaining its ability to work locally (“on-prem”). Cambria has an ultra-modern, unified architecture that scales easily.

Cambria Stream is the newest addition to Capella’s product line. It employs a customizable engine with a REST-based API that can also be deployed on-prem, in the cloud, in a hybrid setting, or in any combination of these locations. Cambria Stream can easily integrate with and adapt to customers' existing ad insertion and live encoding workflows. 

More than a transcoder Cambria FTC is more than just a transcoder; it helps customers organize and process video more efficiently using video/audio recognition and video analysis. It also performs additional video processing while transcoding and supports the latest video and audio codecs, including Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and HEVC 4K formats.

Ikuyo Yamada, Founder and CEO of Capella Systems, said: “With our new features for NAB 2024, we are expanding our cloud technology while retaining the ability to run on-premise or in hybrid mode. Our cutting-edge transcoding engine is designed with this flexibility in mind. We are always looking to improve productivity, and our new tools are specifically designed to create richer metadata automatically. In fact, our mantra is “Metadata for Better Data.”

Automation

New OCR integration helps operators eliminate manual operations and optimize their workflow. For example, in sports applications, Cambria FTC can detect score changes in the video and allow operators to create highlight clips automatically. Additionally, face detection and blur features can be used to organize and re-use archived contents efficiently. A new text-to-speech feature using AI allows operators to create subtitles and metadata for the video content automatically and hassle-free.

Martin Belleau, CTO of Capella Systems, said: 

“Creating more metadata for a video increases its value as it becomes more searchable and reusable. Cambria helps our customers create more metadata automatically.” 

Economies through flexible, distributed topologies 

Cambria products are fully optimized for both CPU and GPU, allowing operators to choose cloud machines based on availability, cost, and individual business priorities. New for NAB is the ability to use multiple NVENC (Nvidia encoding) cards for virtually unlimited encoding scalability. Coupled with the ultra-flexible transcoding engine, this makes Cambria geographically suitable for and adaptable to virtually any workflow. For example, in the U.S where GPU cloud machines are more readily available, customers assign HEVC transcoding jobs to GPU cloud machines for faster processing. Alternatively, in regions with limited GPU cloud machines, customers can use CPU cloud machines to process low bitrate transcoding jobs for optimized video quality.

Cambria Cluster can split source files and send each segment to be encoded by a separate cloud spot instance. It then stitches encoded segments back together to create a single output file. This reduces transcoding time while taking advantage of spot instances' lower cloud computing cost. Cambria Floating License Servers allow operators to move their licenses freely across cloud machines, sharing resources.

Monetization

Cambria products also maximize ad insertion opportunities. Cambria Stream can automatically detect ad breaks and insert SCTE35 signals based on OCR results, significantly reducing cost. Cambria Ad Break Control monitors feeds in real-time to inform operators when to manually insert ad breaks. Operators can increase revenue by inserting ad breaks in unexpected gaps in live coverage.

Partner integration

Cambria Stream is tightly integrated with leading packager solution providers, including Broadpeak and Unified Streaming. Yospace, the pioneer of server-side ad insertion, has integrated Cambria Stream into their Orchestrator module, which initiates multiple Cambria Stream instances in the cloud as needed. This gives customers a rapidly scalable solution for a quick and easy transcoding/packaging setup and an SSAI stack for pop-up events.

Cambria products can run on a variety of cloud servers, such as Akamai Connected Cloud, a massively distributed edge and cloud platform.

New features at-a-glance

Cambria FTC (VOD Transcoding) 

• Dolby Vision support
• Monitoring support (TR 101 290 compatible, verifying the conformity of DBV MPEG TS stream)
• RTP ingest failover support (SMPTE 2022-6/7)
• HLS ingest
• 10-bit video support (HDR10, PQ10, HLG)

Cambria Stream (Live Streaming)

• Read files directly from Azure Blob storage
• Web UI – adds a new encoding preset editor. Operators can configure presets through a Web UI
• Enhanced OCR
• Utilizes AWS SQS, Azure Service bus, where Azure Storage Queues events to trigger transcoding jobs

Focus on the future

Capella’s modern transcoding engine, Cambria FTC, is unbeatable for efficiency, maintainability, and support. Encoding/Transcoding is a crowded field, but no other company has Capella’s combination of experience, performance, and flexibility. With Tier 1 customers like Fox, RTL, and Turner, Capella is the credible choice for today’s and tomorrow’s Live and VOD encoding facilities.

About Capella

Capella has innovated in high-quality, high density transcoding for live streaming and VOD since 2009. Cambria products’ modern, flexible transcoding and live streaming engines adapts to customers’ requirements, is modular and scalable, and tightly integrates with multiple cloud platforms and renowned media tools. It runs either in the cloud, on-prem, or hybrid, with intelligent load balancing, storage distribution and fully optimized workflows, whatever the configuration — it’s architecture that enables. 

Meet us at NAB, booth number W3120.