Plum iTV transcoder is GPU based transcoder, assisted by CPU.
Transcoder is very flexible, provider can choose capacity/quality ratio
by himself which means that there are various settings that allow the provider to adjust the quality of video and increase or decrease the capacity of transcoder. Resolution, Aspect ratio, Bitrate, input/output Codec, input/output Streaming protocol, interlaced/deinterlaced input and quality of transcoding are all the factors that affect the capacity
of transcoder.
Format or container used most commonly for live streaming is MPEG 2 - TS (or simply MPEG-TS) – file. Standard formats that Transcoders support today are H.264 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) and H.265 HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) for video and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) for audio. Resolutions generally supported by transcoders are several SD resolutions including PAL, and for HD - HD ready 720p and Full HD 1080p, also emerging Ultra HD resolution - 4K.
Most common streaming protocols that Transcoders use are UDP, RTP, RTMP. For transcoder to be stable, CPU load shouldn't be higher then 60%-70%, and GPU uttilization 90% and that is the only limitation for one Plum iTV Transcoder.
01.
02.
(resolutions, bitrates and number of profiles)
03.
(HD input > HD output, SD input > SD output)
04.
In case that these conditions are not fulfilled, capacity can decrease compared with estimated capacity. 1 HD ready channel in 3 profiles takes the resources equivalently to 3 SD channels in 3 profiles. 1 Full HD channel in 3 profiles takes the resources equivalently to 5 SD channels in 3 profiles.
Plum iTV Transcoder can have redundancy in a form of Cold spare. That means that files can be saved and backed-up from regular Transcoder, and when there is a fall-out with that Transcoder, Spare one can be up and running in a matter of minutes if adequate support in human resources is provided on provider´s side.
