Powered by Xilinx Alveo U30 media accelerator board

One of the key announcements of the Xilinx Adapt 2021 event was the new Amazon EC2 VT1 instance with the Xilinx Alveo U30 media accelerator card. Amazon is a big customer when it comes to video transcoding and also offers these services through its AWS Amazon EC2 VT1 instances.

The global demand for video content has grown rapidly and has major audiences in Internet traffic and mobile networks. Streaming services such as Twitch continue to see an explosion of content creators seeking a live broadcast with excellent picture quality, while live event broadcasters increasingly seek to adopt an agile cloud infrastructure to reduce costs without sacrificing reliability and adapt effectively to demand.

Twitch is a big customer of Amazon Web Services because transcoding game videos takes a log of resources and the Alveo U30 media accelerator card can handle that load.

Amazon has announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 VT1 instances that feature the same Xilinx® Alveo ™ U30 Media Accelerator transcoding cards used in the SDK.

Amazon VT1 instances are designed to provide the best value for money for multi-stream video transcoding with resolutions up to 4K UHD. Alveo U30 cards provide accelerated H.264 / AVC and H.265 / HEVC codecs and up to 30% better price per stream compared to the latest GPU-based EC2 instances and up to 60% better price per stream compared to the last processor – EC2 based instances.

These instances are the first in the cloud to offer hardware accelerators specifically designed to support live video transcoding. The new EC2 VT1 instances build on the continued success of the EC2 F1 instances, which were the first in the cloud to offer FPGA-based hardware acceleration with easy-to-use, pay-per-view use.

Third party customers

Customers with their own live broadcast and video streaming pipelines can use VT1 instances to transcode video streams with resolutions up to 4K UHD. VT1 instances have network interfaces up to 25 Gbps that can ingest multiple IP video streams with low latency and low jitter. This capability enables these customers to fully adopt a scalable, cost effective and resilient infrastructure.

Amazon EC2 VT1 Instance Type

EC2 VT1 instances are available in three sizes. H.264 / AVC and H.265 / HEVC accelerated codecs are built into Xilinx Zynq ZU7EV SoCs. Each Xilinx® Alveo ™ U30 Media Transcoding Accelerator card contains two Zynq SoCs.

VT1 instances are suitable for transcoding multiple streams per instance. The streams can be processed independently in parallel or in mixing (picture in picture, side by side, transitions). VCPU cores help with the implementation of image processing, audio processing, and multiplexing. The Xilinx® Alveo ™ U30 card can simultaneously output multiple streams at different resolutions (1080p, 720p, 480p and 360p) and in H.264 and H.265.

Each VT1 instance can be configured to produce parallel encoding with different parameters, resolutions and transmission rates (“ABR scales”). For example, a 4K UHD stream can be encoded at 60 frames per second with H.265 for high resolution display. Several lower resolutions can be encoded as H.264 for display on standard screens.

Available now

Amazon EC2 VT1 instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. To learn more, visit the EC2 VT1 instance page.

Getting started with EC2 VT1 instances

It is now possible to launch VT1 instances in the Amazon EC2 console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or using an SDK with the Amazon EC2 API.

If you want to get started with EC2 VT1 instances, you can find more details here.