Hardware Accelerated Decoding

What is decoding?
In the surveillance industry, the decoding is the process of showing the live video or playback streams on the screen. The video has been previously compressed into the compact size to reduce the bitrate, allowing lower bandwidth and storage consumption. During the process of showing the video on the screen, that compressed video will be decoded back to its original format. That requires computing on the VMS client's PC. When a large number of channels are being displayed on the screen at the same time, the CPU would have to compute and do the decoding process for all these channels. When there are too many concurrent channels on the screen to be decoded, the CPU might not always be able to provide full frame rate decoding for all the channels in the layout - in such as there would be lowered frame rate.

What is hardware accelerated decoding?
In order to decode a large number of video channels at the same time with full frame rate, the client PC can make a good use of its built-in GPU. The GPU would support the CPU in the computing process. Especially, GPUs are design to handle this job very efficiently. ACTi's VMS clients, such as NVR 3 client or CMS 2 client, all support GPU-based decoding, also called "Hardware Accelerated Decoding".