White Paper

Ligos MediaRig*:Elevating PC Platforms to Meet Professional Broadcasting Demands

July 2004

“When you are cutting ground on a product with so manyvariables, you don’t want codecdevelopment to be one of them.Performance was simply amust-have, but we wanted ourengineers to be focused onfunctionality, not optimization.”

Reed Hinkel

Vice President of Business DevelopmentOregan Networks

From its inception in 1997, Ligos has worked its videoencoding magic from a platform centered on Intelprocessors. The Ligos GoMotion* codec, one of the firsthigh-quality software-only MPEG-2 encoders to run onmachines powered by the Intel®Pentium®III processor,found a home in a succession of best-selling consumervideo products, including applications from ATI,MGI/Roxio, Ulead and others. The core encoding engineand digital video algorithms, steadily improved overmore than a decade by the Ligos founding engineers,proved highly scalable and adaptable to the demands ofthe professional broadcasting industry. As off-the-shelfdesktop computer systems equaled and then surpassedthe power and performance of dedicated proprietarysystems of years past, Ligos tuned their components tothe requirements of professional broadcasters andreleased MediaRig*. Delivering fast, flexible and scalablecapabilities in a cost-effective package, MediaRigcapitalizes on the advanced performance of IntelPentium 4 and IntelXeon processors. The

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Scaling Performance toAddress Different Markets

Video codec performance represents a prime concernof digital media developers, as well as the professionalbroadcasting community. Speed is essential, whetherdeveloping broadcast applications, authoring DVDs,delivering High-definition (HD) video or transcodingcontent for rendering to consumer electronic devices.The performance capabilities of codecs—as much asthe functionality—becomes an important differentiatorin the marketplace. Designing a successful codec formultiple markets requires attention to the hardwarearchitecture of the target platform. It also requiresoptimization of the code to capitalize on processorfeatures and specialized instructions geared to improvedigital signal processing.

Traditionally, in the professional broadcast industry andrelated fields, performance comes at a price.

Specialized hardware encoders, commonly employed toensure performance levels suited to high-volume mediatasks, can increase the price of an end solution bythousands of dollars. The engineers at Ligos reversedthis trend by developing a versatile MPEG codec tunedto the performance advantages of hardware architecturebased on the latest generation of Intel processors. Theresult is a set of encoding/decoding solutions well suited

professional broadcast community gains the benefits ofproven technology that delivers the quality of

conventional broadcast equipment at comparable costswith significantly more flexibility and reduced total costof ownership. This paper discusses the evolution ofLigos video compression expertise and the

complementary benefits achieved through reliance onIntelarchitecture components.

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