Video Core Next is AMD's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. It is a family of hardware accelerator designs for encoding and decoding video, and is built into AMD's GPUs and

APUs Apus is a small constellation in the southern sky. It represents a bird-of-paradise, and its name means "without feet" in Greek because the bird-of-paradise was once wrongly believed to lack feet. First depicted on a celestial globe by Petrus ...

since AMD Raven Ridge, released January 2018.

Background

Video Core Next is AMD's successor to both the

Unified Video Decoder Unified Video Decoder (UVD, previously called Universal Video Decoder) is the name given to AMD's dedicated video decoding ASIC. There are multiple versions implementing a multitude of video codecs, such as H.264 and VC-1. UVD was introduced w ...

and

Video Coding Engine Video Code Engine (VCE, was earlier referred to as Video Coding Engine, Video Compression Engine or Video Codec Engine in official AMD documentation) is AMD's video encoding application-specific integrated circuit implementing the video codec H ...

designs, which are hardware accelerators for video decoding and encoding, respectively. It can be used to decode, encode and

transcode Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target de ...

("sync") video streams, for example, a

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kin ...

or Blu-ray Disc to a format appropriate to, for example, a

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whic ...

. Unlike video encoding on a CPU or a general-purpose GPU, Video Core Next is a dedicated hardware core on the processor die. This

application-specific integrated circuit An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-effici ...

(ASIC) allows for more power-efficient video processing.

Support

Video Core Next supports:

MPEG-2 MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods, w ...

Decode,

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related ...

Decode,

VC-1 SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, ...

Decode, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Encode/Decode,

HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). In compa ...

Encode/Decode, and VP9 Decode. VCN 2.0 is implemented with Navi products and the Renoir APU. The feature set remains the same as VCN 1.0. VCN 3.0 is implemented with Navi 2 products.

References

{{ATI Video acceleration AMD IP cores Video compression and decompression ASIC

Background

Support

See also

Video hardware technologies

Nvidia

AMD

Intel

References