Support for H.265 and Audio

After more than year of development we’re happy to announce viinex version 3.3.0.634 with support for H.265 video codec and various audio codecs.

Since the main use of viinex is media re-streaming over WebRTC, the implementation of H.265 and audio has to account for this.

In particular, with regards to H.265 the approach was chosen to retrieve the media from video cameras “as is”. If a media archive gets written — H.265 data goes into archive intact. A HEVC video stream can also be retrieved from viinex RTSP server. However right before sending a video stream to the client over WebRTC, — the stream gets transcoded into H.264. This is true for both live and archive streams. Transcoding happens automatically, at a pre-defined quality, preserving the original video resolution.

Quite different approach has been taken for audio support. viinex allows for ingestion of audio encoded with G.711 (A-law and u-law), G.726, AAC and Opus. However, immediately upon retrieval, audio streams get transcoded into Opus (unless audio is already encoded with Opus). This encoding is then used for transmitting of an audio stream between components inside of viinex, to store an audio track in media archive, and to send it over WebRTC.