Ambric Announces H.264 Acceleration Support for Apple Mac OS X Leopard

Ambric Now Shipping the Am2045 Video Reference Platform With Significant Acceleration for Apple Mac Pro and MacBook Pro

Beaverton, Ore. — Ambric® has released software for production that utilizes its Am2045™ massively parallel processor array (MPPA) on the Mac® OS® X Leopard platform. The software plugs into high-level applications, such as Pyro AV® Pyro Kompressor™ software, Sorenson Media’s Squeeze® 5 Pro software, and Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS3, enabling the user to attain up to six times the H.264 encode performance of a software only-based solution.

“Our Squeeze 5 Pro Juiced Accelerator Card utilizes the Am2045 processor to accelerate our H.264 encoding performance,” said Matt Cupal, Sorenson Media’s president and COO. “Ambric’s platform enables our users to significantly accelerate video encoding, while still maintaining the high-quality video output that users have come to expect with Sorenson Squeeze. We see strong market demand for acceleration on the Mac platform and are excited to have this product in our portfolio.”

The Juiced Accelerator Card power consumption is under 15 watts, which enables multiple instances to be installed in PCs with no adverse thermal or electrical effects. Multi-stream codec applications could utilize this scalability to accelerate simultaneous stream encode, decode, and transcode operations.

Pyro AV is in production today with the Pyro Kompressor HD™ accelerator card on both the Windows® and Mac platforms. “With the Ambric support for Mac OS X Leopard, we are able to offer significant performance acceleration to many more of our customers, enabling them to complete more work in less time and achieve a payback in days,” said Alfred Bantug, G.M. of Pyro AV. “We are also very excited about future codec offerings from Ambric that will utilize our existing Pyro Kompressor HD accelerator card, giving us a much broader reach into the video broadcast market with support for AVC-Intra and JPEG 2000.”

Pyro AV also noted that its latest 1.5 version of the Pyro Kompressor transcoding application has valuable new features including logo-insertion, viewing of side-by-side compressed/input frames, and watch folder and batch automation.

Ambic’s Am2045 video acceleration software runs on the Am2045 GT2™ Video Reference Platform that was released earlier this year in collaboration with MainConcept, a leader in video codecs. Working together, Ambric and MainConcept have created a product with MainConcept’s accepted quality and features. MainConcept products are used by professionals world-wide for authoring DVD and Blu-Ray Discs™ while dramatically accelerating the performance.

Ambric’s product is qualified for Apple® Mac Pro workstations, as well as MacBook Pro laptops, which have become extremely popular for field video applications. Because of Ambric’s small size and power footprints, it is ideally suited as an accelerator for laptop-based encoding, with an external PCI Express® box such as the Magma™ ExpressBox.