MainConcept

Last updated
MainConcept GmbH
Type Subsidiary
Industry video/audio encoding
Founded Aachen, Germany, 1993
Founder Markus Mönig, Thomas Zabel
Headquarters
Aachen
,
Germany
Area served
Worldwide
ProductsCodecs, applications, plug-ins
Number of employees
> 100 employees worldwide
Parent Endeavor Streaming
Website www.mainconcept.com

MainConcept GmbH is a software company founded in Germany by Markus Moenig and Thomas Zabel. They specialize in developing video/audio codecs and also applications and plug-ins related to video/audio encoding. They are a subsidiary of Endeavor Streaming, with employees in Germany, Russia, United States and Japan.

Contents

History

MainConcept is a video codec supplier founded in 1993 in Aachen, Germany and a board member of the MPEG Industry Forum. The Russian video codec company Elecard discussed an opportunity to become part of the company between April 2005 and August 2006. In November 2007 MainConcept became a wholly owned subsidiary of DivX, Inc. [1] In June 2010, Sonic Solutions acquired DivX and its subsidiaries in a cash and stock deal valued at $323 million. [2] [3] Rovi Corporation acquired Sonic Solutions (including the MainConcept business) in February 2011 [4] and later sold off the DivX and MainConcept businesses in April 2014. In February 2015, NeuLion, Inc. acquired DivX, LLC including the MainConcept business. [5]

The company has specialized in video codecs since 1995 with a focus on standards, e.g. H.264/AVC, MPEG, AVC-Intra etc.

MainConcept delivered its first MPEG-1/2 Codec in 2001 and its first H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Codec in 2004.

In August 2007, Adobe Systems licensed the H.264 and AAC technology developed by MainConcept for integration into its Adobe Flash Player software. [6] In April 2010 MainConcept signed a strategic collaboration agreement with AMD to accelerate digital video encode. [7] In September 2010, the company launched MainConcept Reference 2.1 for Mac/Windows providing enhanced support for Mac OS 10.5/10.6, Apple iPad, HTML5. [8] [9]

On June 4, 2013, Rovi Corporation released the MainConcept HEVC SDK 1.0. [10] SDK 1.0 supports Smart Adaptive Bitrate Encoding Technology (SABET) which allows for the simultaneous encoding of up to 10 video output streams with reduced computing cost. [10] SDK 1.0 is available for Windows and SDK 1.0.1, which will be released in July 2013, will add support for Linux and Mac OS X. [10] [11] SDK 1.0 supports the Main profile while SDK 2.0, which will be released in Q4 2013, will add support for the Main 10 profile. [11] [12]

IP licensing and SDK products

MPEG -1/2VC-3Codec SDK
H.264/AVCH.265/HEVCDolby Digital Consumer
JPEG2000Motion JPEGDolby Digital Pro SDK
MPEG-4 Part2/H.263Converter & ScalerDolby Digital Plus Pro SDK
DivX Network StreamingScalable Video Coding
DV/DVCPRO 25Audio SDKShowCase
DV/DVCPRO 25/50AACMCE Encoder
DVCPRO HDFlash

Application and plug-in products

TotalCode StudioTotalCode Studio Broadcast PackTotalCode Studio Audio PackDecoder Packs
H.265/HEVCH.264/AVC (10-bit, Intra Class 50 & 100)Dolby Digital Plus ProMPEG-1/2
H.264/AVCXAVC-IntraDolby Digital ProH.264/AVC
MPEG-1/2JPEG2000DTSH.264/AVC Broadcast
DivX, DivX PlusDVCPRO HD
MPEG-4/H.263
VC-1
Plug-Ins for AdobePlug-Ins for Sony
Plug-In for Adobe Flash Media Encoder - AAC EncoderPlug-In for Sony XDCAM Browser & Content Browser
Plug-In for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 & CS6 - TotalCode for Adobe Premiere ProPlug-In for Sony XDCAM SDK based Apps - XDCAM Decoder Pack
Plug-In for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 & CS6 - TotalCode for Adobe Premiere Pro Broadcast PackPlug-In for Ziris Screen Cutter - AVC Encoder
Plug-In for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 & CS6 - TotalCode for Adobe Premiere Pro Digital Cinema Pack
Plug-In for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 & CS6 - TotalCode for Adobe Premiere Pro Audio PackPlug-Ins for IBM
Admira Decoder Pack

Supported Formats

PSP VCD Panasonic P2 DVCPRO
iPod DV Panasonic P2 AVC-Intra
3GP DV AVI AVCHD
Flash DVCAM JPEG 2000
Blu-ray XDCAM IMX Digital TV
DVD XDCAM EX HDV
SVCD XDCAM HD

Awards

See also

Related Research Articles

A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, codec is a portmanteau of encoder and decoder, while a device that only compresses is typically called an encoder, and one that only decompresses is a decoder.

DivX Brand of video codec products by DivX, LLC

DivX is a brand of video codec products developed by DivX, LLC. There are three DivX codecs: the original MPEG-4 Part 2 DivX codec, the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC DivX Plus HD codec and the High Efficiency Video Coding DivX HEVC Ultra HD codec. The most recent version of the codec itself is version 6.9.2, which is several years old. New version numbers on the packages now reflect updates to the media player, converter, etc.

DivX, Inc. Video technology company

DivX, Inc. is a privately held video technology company based in San Diego, California. DivX, LLC is best known as a producer of three codecs: an MPEG-4 Part 2-based codec, the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC DivX Plus codec and the High Efficiency Video Coding DivX HEVC Ultra HD codec. The company's software has been downloaded over 1 billion times since January 2003. DivX, LLC's offerings have expanded beyond the codec to include software for viewing and authoring DivX-encoded video. DivX, LLC also licenses its technologies to manufacturers of consumer electronics devices and components used in these devices, of which over 1 billion DivX-enabled devices have shipped worldwide. DivX certifies that these licensed products are able to properly play DivX-encoded video.

SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, it was officially approved as a SMPTE standard on April 3, 2006. It was primarily marketed as a lower-complexity competitor to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard. After its development, several companies other than Microsoft asserted that they held patents that applied to the technology, including Panasonic, LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics.

x264 is a free and open-source software library and a command-line utility developed by VideoLAN for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding format. It is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Quarter-pixel motion(also known as Q-pel motion or Qpel motion) refers to using a quarter of the distance between pixels as the motion vector precision for motion estimation and motion compensation in video compression schemes. It is used in many modern video coding formats such as MPEG-4 ASP, H.264/AVC, and HEVC. Though higher precision motion vectors take more bits to encode, they can sometimes result in more efficient compression overall, by increasing the quality of the prediction signal.

Α video codec is software or a device that provides encoding and decoding for digital video, and which may or may not include the use of video compression and/or decompression. Most codecs are typically implementations of video coding formats.

MPEG LA is an American company based in Denver, Colorado that licenses patent pools covering essential patents required for use of the MPEG-2, MPEG-4, IEEE 1394, VC-1, ATSC, MVC, MPEG-2 Systems, AVC/H.264 and HEVC standards.

The following is a list of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC products and implementations.

Video Acceleration API (VA-API) is an open source application programming interface that allows applications such as VLC media player or GStreamer to use hardware video acceleration capabilities, usually provided by the graphics processing unit (GPU). It is implemented by the free and open-source library libva, combined with a hardware-specific driver, usually provided together with the GPU driver.

AVC-Intra is a type of video coding developed by Panasonic, and then supported in products made by other companies. AVC-Intra is available in Panasonic's high definition broadcast products, such as, for example, their P2 card equipped broadcast cameras.

VP8 Open and royalty-free video coding format released by Google in 2010

VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008.

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding. In comparison to AVC, HEVC offers from 25% to 50% better data compression at the same level of video quality, or substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate. It supports resolutions up to 8192×4320, including 8K UHD, and unlike the primarily 8-bit AVC, HEVC's higher fidelity Main 10 profile has been incorporated into nearly all supporting hardware.

Intel Quick Sync Video is Intel's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. Quick Sync was introduced with the Sandy Bridge CPU microarchitecture on 9 January 2011 and has been found on the die of Intel CPUs ever since.

A video coding format is a content representation format for storage or transmission of digital video content. It typically uses a standardized video compression algorithm, most commonly based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) coding and motion compensation. A specific software, firmware, or hardware implementation capable of compression or decompression to/from a specific video coding format is called a video codec.

VP9 Open and royalty-free video coding format released by Google in 2013

VP9 is an open and royalty-free video coding format developed by Google.

High Efficiency Video Coding implementations and products covers the implementations and products of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC).

MulticoreWare

MulticoreWare Inc is a software development company, offering products and services related to HEVC video compression, machine learning, compilers for heterogeneous computing, and software performance optimization services. MulticoreWare's customers include AMD, Microsoft, Google, Qualcomm and Telestream. MulticoreWare was founded in 2009 and today has offices in 3 countries – USA, China and India.

References

  1. "DivX buys video technologies provider MainConcept for $22 mln". Reuters. November 14, 2007.
  2. "Sonic Solutions to Acquire DivX". Forbes . June 2, 2010. Retrieved September 22, 2010.
  3. Robin Wauters (June 2, 2010). "Sonic Solutions To Acquire DivX In $323 Million Deal". Tech Crunch. Retrieved 26 June 2012.
  4. "Rovi To Buy Sonic Solutions For $720 Million". Forbes . December 23, 2010.
  5. "NeuLion Completes Acquisition of DivX". Marketwired. January 30, 2015.
  6. James "Dela" Delahunty (August 25, 2007). "MainConcept licenses core codec technologies to Adobe for Flash". AfterDawn. Retrieved September 22, 2010.
  7. Jai C.S. (April 12, 2010). "MainConcept and AMD Collaborate for GPU Acceleration". TMCnet. Retrieved September 22, 2010.
  8. "メインコンセプト、MainConcept Reference 2.1 for Mac/Windowsの日本国内販売を開始" (in Japanese). ProNews. September 6, 2010. Retrieved September 22, 2010.
  9. "HTML5- תלת מימד ותמיכה ב- IBM בתערוכת MainConcept" (in Hebrew). September 12, 2010. Retrieved September 22, 2010.
  10. 1 2 3 "Rovi Releases MainConcept HEVC SDK". Rovi Corporation. 2013-06-04. Archived from the original on 2013-06-16. Retrieved 2013-06-05.
  11. 1 2 "HEVC/H.265". Rovi Corporation. Retrieved 2013-06-05.
  12. David Fox (2013-06-07). "Rovi releases MainConcept HEVC SDK". TVBEurope. Archived from the original on 2013-06-16. Retrieved 2013-06-08.
  13. "Video filtering and compression by MSU Video Group". Moscow State University . Retrieved September 22, 2010.