Beamr Imaging Inc (BMR)

[Helter Skelter]

🧐 Look what NVIDIA ($NVDA) has to say about BEAMR ($BMR):

"The CABR-optimized video can provide 10-30% in savings as compared to the original NVENC compression."

10-30% savings over Trillion Dollar NVIDIA's NVENC compression!

BOOMSHAKALAKA! > developer.nvidia.com < NVENC = NVidia ENCoder | CABR = $BMR



NVENC low-level APIs for H.264, HEVC, and AV1
Video Codec SDK 12.1 exposes a few more low-level APIs for H.264, HEVC, and AV1 encoders to control the hardware encoder’s internal state. These APIs are useful for applications that want fine control over encoding quality.

• Iterative encoding: The iterative encoding enables you to freeze the encoder’s automatic state-advancing. You can then re-encode the same frame, each time with a different delta-QP. NVENC stores all possible new states and enables you to stop iterating and manually force advancement based on any one of the iterations.
• ReCon: You can access the higher-quality, reconstructed frame in the hardware encoder’s recon loop. NVENC also supports the QP and bit-count stats at the row and block levels.
• External look ahead: This API offers enhanced control for lookahead functionality. The API enables you to decide the scaling for the lookahead pass. The default is 1/16th resolution.

Iterative encoding, recon, and external look ahead are used by Beamr’s Content Adaptive Bit Rate (CABR) library, which works jointly with NVENC to create fully standard-compliant bitstreams. These bitstreams have the lowest possible bit rate for a given perceptual quality, achieved by finding the maximum compression level per frame without any visible quality degradation.

Using the CABR library with the Video Codec SDK enables various use cases including the following:

• Encoder optimization: For existing NVENC users, CABR can be used with the same configuration and bit rate settings to generate compressed videos of the same perpetual quality as the original NVENC encode. The CABR-optimized video can provide 10-30% in savings as compared to the original NVENC compression.
• Encoder modernization: The CABR-NVENC optimizations can be used without specifying any bit rate. In this case, the algorithm produces a compressed video of perceptually identical quality to the original with up to 50% compression gain. This flow enables it to transcode from codec to codec and preserve the same quality between bitstreams.

Two versions of the same image with one using CABR and resulting in higher-quality compressed HEVC video.



Figure 2. CABR yields higher-quality video than traditional compression
methods while maintaining significant bit rate savings

Bitrate savings can vary greatly per file and scene, but typically average 30% – 40%. These savings from CABR video lessen storage needs, significantly reducing costs where millions of streams must be stored in high quality.

In situations where the underlying encode is already aggressive relative to the native resolution, it may be impossible to reduce bitrate further without degrading quality. On the other hand, in cases like user-generated content (UGC) on smartphones, a conservative bitrate is used to guarantee the quality, and CABR can achieve up to 60%-70% savings. These optimizations also reduce content delivery network (CDN) costs by minimizing bandwidth requirements.

Before integration with NVENC, CABR was only possible with offline processing. Now, powered by NVIDIA GPUs, CABR-NVENC runs in real time, transforming its use to optimize live video creation services.

$BMR