INDUSTRY

OTTAWA, Canada -- GridIron Software Inc. today announced it has successfully encoded MPEG-4 video using multiple computers with its GridIron XLR8 software solution for distributed computing. While video encoding has been accelerated previously with hardware products, this represents the first time a software solution has been used to distribute and accelerate the encoding process across multiple "off the shelf" computers outside of a controlled laboratory environment. This represents a revolutionary breakthrough in digital video," said GridIron co-founder, CTO and President Steve Forde. "With high definition looming as the imminent new standard for video, faster encoding is the single biggest challenge that video production technology must address. GridIron is the first to respond to this challenge with a practical and cost-efficient software solution." GridIron XLR8 is an application development tool and runtime software that makes it Profoundly Simple(TM) to develop, use and manage applications with the added speed of distributed computing. GridIron developers modified source code for the MPEG4IP MPEG-4 encoder to include the GridIron XLR8 APIs. The GridIron APIs distribute processing-intensive coding tasks amongst computers equipped with the GridIron XLR8 runtime software. The GridIron implementation achieved essentially linear speed up of the encoding process, i.e. it ran nearly twice as fast on two machines, three times as fast on three machines, etc. "Our GridIron developers followed the same process any software developer would use," said Bill Love, GridIron VP of Research and Development. "Even though we're not encoding experts, it took just a couple of days to add the GridIron XLR8 APIs to the source code. It would be even easier for a software developer familiar with their own encoding algorithms, or any computationally intensive application for that matter, to add the speed of distributed computing to their application." A white paper describing distributed video encoding using GridIron XLR8 and the MPEG4IP software encoder are available at the GridIron website www.gridironsoftware.com. Furthermore, a complete and fully functioning version of GridIron XLR8, including documentation, APIs and the runtime software can be downloaded free for development and testing purposes.