Whitepaper · Video encoding · Hardware encoders and modern codecs
The same encoder, fewer bits — and a better picture.
Your encoder is already paid for, and most of it is never switched on. We tune hardware encoders on NVIDIA, Intel, Rockchip and HiSilicon silicon — and the camera chips upstream of them — so you ship the same quality at lower bitrate, measured on your own content rather than a vendor's demo clip.
Measured by us on stock hardware and on camera chips we ship firmware for; our engineers publish the encoder work on vmetrix.tech.
You bought throughput and accepted the quality it came with
A hardware encoder is chosen for frames per second, and the driver's defaults were written for a demo, not for your content. Every percent of bitrate you do not reclaim is paid monthly — in egress, in storage, in the radio link that drops a frame under load — for as long as the product lives.
Vendor numbers will not help you, because each was measured against a badly configured competitor. We have watched most of an apparent win evaporate once the baseline was set up properly. You need someone who tunes your baseline first, and only then tells you what is left on the table.
Tune the baseline before you claim to beat it.
What we bring
Four things, each one measured on the hardware.
Bits you stop paying for
Savings compound over the life of a stream: fewer bytes on every second of every camera, every month, from settings the default path never exposes.
Quality you can defend
We score with a composite of three perceptual metrics, not one number that can be gamed. When a configuration wins, it wins on all three, or we tell you why not.
Silicon you already own
No new hardware, no licence. The gains come from rate control, lookahead, quantisation maps and mode choices that sit unused in the encoder you have.
Camera to cloud
We tune the encoder on a five-dollar camera chip with the same rigour as a data-centre GPU, including layered streams that let one encode serve live view and recording.
Results on real silicon
Embedded encoders
A 5 W embedded encoder beat a desktop GPU by 8–13% bitrate at 4K in HEVC, at an order of magnitude lower cost. Its H.264 was weaker, and we say so — the right choice depends on the decoders you must serve. The whole study is published, presets and all.
Data-centre encoders
NVIDIA and Intel encoders measured across low-latency and quality presets in H.264, HEVC and AV1, against the software encoders they are sold to replace, in a comparison database we keep current. Every result comes with its method, so your team can rerun it on your content.
Camera encoders
On the camera chips we ship firmware for, the encoder's reference structure alone makes a static scene 3.1× cheaper to stream, and a lost packet costs one frame instead of a whole group. We know each chip's real pixel-rate ceiling and put temporal layers on two platforms so one stream serves three consumers.
What we tune
NVIDIAIntelRockchipHiSilicon & GokeSigmaStarH.264 · HEVC · AV1
Hardware encoders on desktop, server and embedded silicon; software encoders where they still win; the camera-side encoders in OpenIPC firmware. Scored with perceptual metrics validated against the reference implementation, on your content.
How an engagement works
Encoder audit
Fixed price, ten working days. You send three representative clips, your encoder platform and settings, and the target — bitrate, storage or quality. You get your baseline tuned and measured, a recommended configuration, and the saving at equal quality on your own content, with the scores behind it.
The project
We implement it in your pipeline: the API path, rate control, quantisation maps, temporal layers — validated on your fleet's content mix, on the hardware you run.
Keep
You own the settings, the measurement harness and the report. Rerun it when the content or the hardware changes; call us when the answer surprises you.
Send three clips. In ten days you will know what your encoder is leaving on the table.
One mail with four lines: the encoder platform and codec, the content and resolution, what you want to cut, and where the clips can be picked up. An engineer answers with a plan, not a sales script.
Write to business@openipc.org Ask in the chat
Commercial support, OEM licensing and the other services are on the business page.