Visited the Inlet Technology booth the other day and talked to Neal Page, Inlet CEO.

Lots of developments at Inlet, which makes hardware cards and systems to encode to VC-1/WMV, and has become recognized as among the leading companies working in this fast growing market. (VC-1 is the SMPTE spec that‘s a variation of Microsoft‘s Windows Media Video.)

The Raleigh, N.C. company has announced that it will now crunch down video to include AVC (H.264 / MPEG-4), the other major spec for DVDs, the ‘net, etc. Demos presented AVC encoding within both the Fathom compression card and Semaphore, a quality control app. Production release follows later this year.

Just a couple of weeks ago, SMPTE completed the standardization process for the VC-1 advanced encoding format. VC-1 is now part of the HD DVD and Blu-ray specs, while Microsoft’s WMV9 format now becomes an implementation of the VC-1 standard.

Fathom 2.5, demonstrated for the first time at the show, is claimed as the industry‘s first realtime encoding solution for HD content. Compared to traditional software encoders, Fathom is said to run around four to six times faster for compressing SD content and up to 40 times faster for HD.

Semaphore QC, meanwhile, is a quality control app that runs less that $1,000, yet can quickly scan completed VC-1 and MPEG-4 (H.264) jobs to highlight problem areas that can tweaked for better performance.