General information
Besides general capabilities descriptions on this website, take a look at these pages.
- Legal information regarding Live Transcoder.
- Usage snapshots show examples of combined usage of Softvelum products including live transcoder.
- Transcoder uses some code from FFmpeg like filter, and there are several advantages over FFmpeg which make Transcoder more efficient.
- Read more about performance tuning of Transcoder.
- Live Transcoder review by Jan Ozer gives general overview of the product.
- How to Create a Live HLS Feed With HEVC article describes HEVC HLS streaming setup.
- NEW: Use live video and file overlays to create videowall with Live Transcoder.
- Video: Make mosaic video wall with Nimble Streamer Transcoder how-to tutorial.
- Live Transcoder troubleshooting describes how you can avoid some of the common transcoding issues.
- WMSPanel control API allows manipulating Transcoder scenarios and change their settings.
Software encoding and decoding
- Set up bitrate, profile and more for libx264
- Set up constant bitrate
- Handling fuzzy FPS to get proper bitrate output
- Use decoder threads
- Run Out-of-process transcoding to improve stability against third-party libraries
- NDI setup and usage which includes transcoding
- Synchronize output NDI with NTP SEI metadata.
SEI support also includes SEI metadata forwarding - SVT-HEVC (libsvthevc) software encoding setup
- SVT-AV1 and libaom-av1 software encoding settings for AV1
- VP8/VP9 encoding setup
- VA API (libVA) setup
- FDK audio transcoder
- Create streams from video and audio files and also bind un-synced streams
- Create custom FFmpeg builds to use currently unsupported encoding and filtering libraries
- NETINT encoder is supported via custom FFmpeg build
Usage
Here are some useful cases for Transcoder usage
- Create wild-card scenarios for ABR
- Use ABR wizard to create ABR streams for various protocols and codecs.
- Conditional ABR transcoding based on input stream resolution
- Setting out-of-process mode for encoders to improve robustness
- Streams emergency hot swap to cover cases like U.S. EAS
- Streams fail-over hot swap to show tuning table or other active channel
- Fail-over setup for RTMP, RTSP and Icecast streams published into Nimble Streamer using hot swap
- Video de-interlacing filter
- Audio re-sampling via filter, e.g. 44KHz to 22KHz
- Manipulate audio channels via filter, e.g. mono/stereo, language channels
- Transcoder API is available for basic control operations over transcoding scenarios
- Server playlist in Nimble Streamer allows creating live streams from VOD files
- NEW: Convert DVB subtitles into WebVTT for HLS live streams using image recognition AI
AMD Alveo hardware acceleration
Nimble support Alveo U30 cards, with MA35D coming soon.
- Alveo U30 feature set in Transcoder
- Boosting live transcoding with AMD Alveo U30 on AWS EC2 VT1 with Nimble Streamer
NVENC
NVidia NVENC is fully supported in Live Transcoder. Read these pages for details:
- NVENC feature set in Transcoder
- GPU decoding via NVidia GPU
- H.264/AVC video encoder parameters
- H.265/HEVC video encoder parameters
- Building NVENC-only transcoding pipelines with Nimble Transcoder
- Stress-testing of Tesla M60 GPU
- Context sharing is supported to cover such high load use cases
- Zabbix monitoring of Nimble Streamer allows tracking server status, SRT streams and NVidia GPU status
NVidia hardware may require additional attention.
- List of NVENC-powered devices
- Installing NVidia device drivers
- When updating NVidia drivers, follow these guidelines
- NVENC encoding on Amazon EC2 GPU review describes types of instances which can be used for efficient GPU HEVC encoding
Quick Sync
Intel Quick Sync is fully supported in Live Transcoder. Read these pages for details:
- Quick Sync feature set in Transcoder
- Enable Quick Sync on Windows
- Enable Quick Sync on CentOS
- Enable Quick Sync on Ubuntu
- Quick Sync H.264 encoder parameters allow controlling AVC encoding process
- Quick Sync H.265 encoder parameters gives capabilities to control HEVC encoding
- Building Quick Sync-only transcoding pipelines with Nimble Transcoder
Metadata pass-through and forwarding
Nimble Streamer allows forwarding certain metadata through Live Transcoder.
- CEA-708 subtitles forwarding
- DVB subtitles forwarding
- SCTE-35 markers passthrough
- Icecast metadata passthrough
- RTMP Icecast metadata passthrough
Voice recognition
Live Transcoder is used in AI-powered speech recognition based on Whisper.cpp library and model.
Nimble Streamer allows automatically generate closed captions and create translation subtitles for live streams.
The output is provided as WebVTT subtitles for HLS live streams. Read more on the overview page.
Videos
Our YouTube channel has a number of videos showing how Transcoder can be used in various use cases. Watch this playlist: