A Software-Based Approach to Media Processing
The transcoding of video data remotely in the cloud is experiencing significant growth that is driven by a variety of cloud video applications. As a result, there is a pressing need for a video coding technology that enables encoders to address the many transcoding requirements of such video applications.
Scalable Video Technology (SVT) is a software-based video coding technology that is highly optimized for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel® Xeon® D processors.
SVT technology and the visual cloud are created to enable this coming wave of new visual applications.
What is the Visual Cloud?
In general terms, the visual cloud refers to the amalgamation of cloud hardware, software, and networking infrastructure that allows efficient remote processing and delivery of media, graphics, and gaming content, as well as enables demanding applications such as media analytics and immersive media. With the ever increasing amount of visual data being generated from various sources, encoding has become a critical part of most visual cloud applications. Encoding is required to compress the source visual content into the least number of bits in the least amount of time, without significantly affecting the visual quality of the source material.
What is SVT?
Scalable Video Technology (SVT) is a software-based video coding technology that allows encoders on any x86 CPU to achieve the best-possible tradeoffs between performance, latency and visual quality. SVT also facilitates performance level scaling of encoders, given the quality and latency requirements of the target applications. The efficiency and scalability of SVT are supported through mainly architectural and algorithmic features, and also via specific optimizations for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel® Xeon® D processors.
SVT encoder core as part of a transcoding solution. The SVT encoder core is shown in white. The rest of the visual transcoder’s components are provided by partner codec ISVs and/or customers.

SVT-AV1 encoders are made available to the open source community via a highly-permissive AOM patent and BSD-2 clause license, allowing adopters to reduce the time-to-market and cost-of-ownership of each of their SVT-enabled cloud video transcoding solutions.
SVT and the Open Visual Cloud
SVT-HEVC
The SVT-HEVC encoder supports HEVC Main and Main10 profiles (up to Level 6.2) and video input resolutions up to 8Kp60, 4:2:0, 8-bit and 10-bit. The SVT-HEVC encoder includes two modes: Objective-quality (OQ) mode and visual-quality (SQ) mode. The SVT-HEVC encoder was released to the Open Source community in September of 2018.
SVT-AV1
SVT-VP9
The SVT-VP9 Encoder is a VP9-compliant encoder library core. The SVT-VP9 Encoder is being optimized to achieve excellent performance levels currently supporting 10 density-quality presets on a system with a dual Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor targeting real-time encoding of up to two 4Kp60 streams on the Gold 6140 with M8. The SVT-VP9 encoder core was released to open source on February 15, 2019.
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