This was our first meeting with Silex Inside, the MBO of the Barco Silex business (Barco Silex Buys Barco Out to Become “Silex Inside”). Staff on the booth told us that one of the reasons for the MBO was that the ‘strategies were diverging’ between the firms.
Silex has been developing codecs and as we have been reporting over the last couple of years, it has a ‘light’ codec using the VC2 standard that gives 4 to 8 times compression with very low latency (<5ms) and the company has also its own JPEG2000 codec technology.
One of the demos at the show was of 4KP60 video being transmitted with 4:4:4 sub-sampling and all features including AV67 audio over a commercial 1Gbps ethernet infrastructure. The company was also highlighting how its technology could be used to drive video walls over a standard ethernet architecture.
The company was showing its Viper board which can be powered by POE when decoding VC2, although this needs to be boosted to POE+ to support JPEG 2000, but Silex told us that this codec can operate with as little as 10ms latency for JPEG2000 or 5ms for VC2, depending on the memory configuration. The board can encode or decode HDMI 2.0 to be transmitted over 1G ethernet.
The Silex Inside HDMI over ethernet boards can use VC2 or JPEG2000. Image:Meko
