TECHNOLOGY

Technology

Overview

Beamr Video is a perceptual video optimizer that significantly reduces the bitrate of video streams, while preserving their full resolution and quality. Beamr Video produces fully standard H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) streams, which can be played by any media player, browser or consumer device without installing special software.

Beamr Video optimizes video streams by reducing their bitrate while preserving the visual quality. The Beamr Video algorithm imitates the perceptual qualities of the human visual system, ensuring the video stream is compressed to the maximum extent possible by removing redundancies, without creating any visual artifacts in the process. This enables fully automatic, maximal compression of video streams with no human intervention required.

Quality Measure

At the heart of Beamr Video's patent-pending optimization technology is a unique perceptual image quality measure, developed during 6 years of intensive research. Beamr Video's quality measure has much higher correlation with subjective results than existing quality measures such as PSNR and SSIM. The correlation of our quality measure with subjective results has been proven in user testing according to the strict requirements of the ITU BT.500 standard for image quality testing. Our quality measure and related technologies are covered by 5 granted patents and 60 pending applications.

Based on our perceptual quality measure, Beamr Video determines the subjective quality level of the input and output video streams, and uses this information to control the video encoding process. Beamr Video functions as a controller for standard software and hardware H.264 encoders, and helps the encoders make smarter decisions based on true visual quality.

Performance

The table below summarizes the typical bitrate reduction ratios achieved by Beamr Video optimization for various types of content.