At NAB2009, Grass Valley™ is demonstrating, for the first time in North America, the ViBE Transcoder ‘ the latest addition to its ViBE encoding family. The ViBE Transcoder provides a direct conversion between different compression rates and algorithms, transcoding standard- and high-definition (SD/HD) video between MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 H.264 formats.
The ViBE line is a proven and popular solution to a broad range of digital broadcasting requirements, with industry leading compression efficiency. The ViBE Transcoder accepts a compressed digital video stream as an input and transcodes it into the required delivery format.

There are many applications where access to the original baseband video is not practical. These include digital turnaround applications, for example for IPTV, where there is a requirement to take a large number of channels and convert them to the delivery standard. A typical example might take channels in MPEG-2 from a satellite and output them in MPEG-4 H.264 at a significantly lower bitrate to fit into the IPTV bandwidth. Cable companies might be transitioning to an MPEG-4 H.264 contribution network but need to transcode to MPEG-2 for legacy set-top boxes.

Other applications might need to preserve the video but perform audio processing tasks. An incoming Dolby AC-3 audio format could be converted to MPEG, or to AAC for IPTV. In multi-channel pass-through centers content from different sources may have different audio levels: the ViBE Transcoder can be used to equalize audio levels to deliver a consistent standard across a complete service.

All these applications and many others can be addressed by the new Grass Valley ViBE Transcoder. It uses the acclaimed algorithms developed by Grass Valley to achieve the best possible quality for each codec and bitrate, and delivers a significantly better perceived result than simple transrating. The Grass Valley ViBE Transcoder can process multiple streams in a single 1 RU chassis, allowing operators to create compact headend systems which are energy efficient as well as highly practical.

“Today, our industry is all about getting the content to people when they want it, where they want it, at the best possible quality for the platform,” said Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Grass Valley. “Our ViBE product line has a solution for every encoding requirement, from premium HD channels to mobile television. The ViBE Transcoder fits into that heritage, meeting a real need in the multi-channel, multi-platform world.”
The ViBE Transcoder is available now, and is already in operation with a number of service operators in Europe.