Vidyo Brings Ultra HD to its Solutions

Vidyo has announced a new soft room with Ultra HD, available as a software application for standard equipment. The VidyoRoom Soft Edition (SE) and Ultra HD (4K) rendering capabilities can improve the VidyoRoom HD-230 and VidyoPanorama 600 solutions, enhancing Vidyo's software-based portfolio.

The new products boast several firsts to the Vidyo line. They enable video and content rendering in Ultra HD, and offer a fully-functional, software-only group solution that provides an improved performance capability designed to exceed that of immersive telepresence systems. Furthermore, it offers 4K-ready infrastructure and 4K rendering endpoints as software-only upgrades, so as to provide high quality video without the need to purchase new hardware.

The VidyoRoom SE is a software application that customers can install on their existing computers. The new soft room system turns any meeting space into an HD video-enabled room able to leverage the latest innovation in hardware and peripherals. It offers features such as calendar integration for meeting connections, automatic rendering of shared content on any additional screens, and a user interface built with remote control operation in mind. All this can be installed as an application on an open compute platform, so as to simplify access to content at a low TCO.

Vidyo Ultra HD is intended to provide true 4K rendering, creating a video environment that displays the finest of details. It uses an Ultra HD display to render in high detail for multiple HD video streams, while using the same number of pixels as 4x1080p displays. 4k is offered as a free upgrade for VidyoRoom HD-230 and VidyoPanorama 600 systems that are on a current maintenance and support plan, as well as an option for new VidyoRoom SE customers.

UCStrategies notes that while adding new functionality, this solution uses H.265, and is based on 1080p60, which other vendors support, but Vidyo cleverly maps that stream in any of several ways, controlled by the customer. While H.265 is more efficient, if Vidyo maps four 1080p60 images onto a 4K screen, it will use at least twice as much bandwidth as the same size 2K screen. As with any video solution, enterprise customers will need to identify the business and use cases that can best take advantage of these capabilities, and examine their bandwidth needs and capacities.

"With this announcement, Vidyo continues their product line innovation", said Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, UniComm Consulting and co-founder of UCStrategies. "While the market for 4K resolution in video conferencing rooms is nascent, Vidyo is claiming their place with this software-based approach for mapping 1080p video streams onto 4K screens, giving their customers more flexibility to display multiple video conference participants with high definition on the new high-end displays."

The VidyoRoom SE and Vidyo 4K will be made available this July.