Tutorial: How to Leverage HEVC Compression with the Teradek VidiU Go
By Adam Noyes
Paul Schmutzler explains how you can take advantage of the cost and bandwidth savings of HEVC in your livestreams with the Teradek VidiU Go.
Check out Streamingmedia.com’s video HERE
Today I’m going to talk to you about how you can stream flawless, high-quality video to your audience and save a ton of data at the same time. Why does it matter what codec you can stream in? Your audience may not care if you’re using H.264 or H.265 compression, but your wallet will.
Let me explain. It takes about 6 megabits of data per second (Mbps) to stream a 1080p video in H.264, also known as AVC. Most of the encoders you use today are utilizing this codec. Assuming you’re paying about 50 cents per gigabyte, you’d pay $1.35 to stream a one-hour program.
H.265, also known as HEVC, uses approximately half the bandwidth of H.264, and provides a higher-quality stream. With HEVC, you’re paying only 68 cents to stream that same hour of footage. You just cut your cost in half by making one simple change.
HEVC is still a new technology, so there aren’t a lot of encoders out there that can do this. But the Teradek VidiU Go can. What’s more, the Go lets you easily switch between H.265 and H.264 if you ever need to.
But most live platforms don’t support HEVC yet, right? That’s true, which is why Teradek provides a solution that lets you take full advantage of HEVC now.
Teradek’s cloud service Core comes with some amazing benefits. One of them is the ability to transcode H.265 to H.264, the standard that all your favorite platforms support. By streaming to Core and HEVC and transcoding it, you save a ton of data on the uplink and deliver the same high-quality video to your audience. Core can also stream to multiple platforms at the same time. Twitch, YouTube, Facebook custom RTMP, and many more are all supported. Connecting the Go to Core is easy.
In the example in the tutorial video, I send Core an HEVC stream and Core is transcoding that to send it to my different platforms. With the Go, you’re already future-proofed and ready to take advantage of cutting-edge video compression.
So, whether you’re in a crowded auditorium or on a remote mountaintop, the Teradek VidiU Go with HEVC encoding technology can ensure your stream is robust and beautiful, even in the most challenging of broadband areas.