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Zixi Broadcaster's live transcoding offers a single solution for the universal origination and distribution of high quality, adaptive live broadcast content to OTT workflows, digital MVPDs, MSOs, hotels, cinemas, iPhone and Android player apps as well as other destinations. The Zixi Transcoder supports H.265/HEVC, H.264/AVC, and MPEG2, and Raw video codecs as well as a variety of audio codecs (e.g. AAC, OPUS, Raw) most commonly used for live broadcast and OTT workflows. For OTT and Social Media/eSports, the transcoder can repackage a live stream to HLS, DASH, and RTMP, backhaul via Zixi protocol, and output MPEG-TS, RTP, UDP, NDI, and WebRTC for reintegration into broadcast systems.

With the Zixi transcoder you can:

• Deliver to any device anywhere in different bitrates and protocols simultaneously
• Repackage streams to a variety of formats and protocols including MPEG 2, H.264, HEVC encode and decode
• Synchronize GOPs for multi-bitrate delivery

The transcoder typically employed in the following cases:

• Where a target device does not support the source format.
• Where a target has limited storage capacity that requires a reduced file size.
• To convert incompatible obsolete data to a better-supported or modern format.
• You can add video (H.264, H.265, MPEG2, Raw) and audio (AAC, OPUS, Raw) profiles.

Typical Workflows

Typical workflows for the Zixi transcoder include:

• Broadcast backhaul – Compress high bitrate live mezzanine MPEG2 to lower bitrate H264 or H265, at the same quality level, to reduce bandwidth requirements for video uplink. When uplink bandwidth is scarce or cost is at a premium, compression of live content can make possible an otherwise impractical workflow.
• Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) – Deliver live mezzanine video transcoded into multiple renditions of H264 or H265 and packaged into HLS or DASH formats to laptops, mobile devices and set top boxes via Content Delivery Networks, YouTube Live or similar services. Adaptive streams can also be delivered via the Zixi protocol to Zixi enabled endpoints.
• Bitrate reduction and packaging for Social Media – Deliver live mezzanine video transcoded to lower bitrate H264 and packaged into RTMP or HLS to Social Media sites such as Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and Twitch.

Transcoding Options

The transcoding feature in the Zixi Broadcaster is available using the following transcoding options:

• Software-based codec - uses the x264 codec from VideoLAN for video encoding.
• Intel GPU-based codec - Intel Quick Sync GPUs are available on bare-metal motherboards. The Zixi Transcoder also supports a software only solution using the X264 codec for lower density applications applications. Intel-based transcoding is not supported for Zixi v16 and beyond.
• NVIDIA GPU-based codec - available in PCIe boards for bare-metal installations and on cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure.

Ad Insertion Options

Zixi's transcoder supports the following ad insertion options:

• SCTE-35 passthrough to Zixi TS
• SCTE-35 converted to CUE-OUT/CUE-IN in HLS
• SCTE-35 converted to Splice Events in DASH
• SCTE-35 converted to OnCuePoint in RTMP
• API Injection with output to SCTE-35 in Zixi TS
• API Injection with output to CUE-OUT/CUE-IN in HLS
• API Injection with output to Splice Events in DASH
• API Injection with output to OnCuePoint in RTMP

Captioning Options

Zixi's transcoder supports the following captioning options:

• Elementary Stream ATSC (608/708) passthrough to Zixi TS
• Elementary Stream ATSC (608/708) passthrough to HLS
• Elementary Stream ATSC (608/708) passthrough to DASH
• Elementary Stream ATSC (608/708) passthrough to RTMP
• DVB track passthrough to Zixi TS

Audio Processing Options

• Passthrough of multiple audio tracks
• Passthrough of unsupported codecs such as E-AC-3
• Audio Sample Rate Conversion - 44.1KHz to/from 48KHz

Audio Decode

• AAC Low Complexity, High Efficiency V1, High Efficiency V2
• AC3 (Dolby Digital)
• MP2 (MPEG-2 Audio Layer II)
• MP1 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer II)
• Opus

Audio Encode

• AAC Low Complexity
• High Efficiency V1
• High Efficiency V2
• Opus

Video Processing

• Passthrough
• 10-bit to 8-bit color downscaling
• Thumbnail extraction as HLS playlist
• Deinterlacing (non-telecine)
• PID pass-thru
• Black bar insertion
• Cropping
• Smooth framerate conversion – up and down