Tencent Canghai V2 Hardware Encoder Wins 12 First‑Place Awards at MSU Competition

MSU Competition Results

The MSU hardware encoder contest, the most influential event in video compression, featured 15 competing solutions across four speed tiers (30 fps, 60 fps, 120 fps, 240 fps). Tencent’s Canghai V2 secured first place in every evaluation metric for all three speed tiers it entered, earning a total of twelve first‑place awards. Compared with leading H.265 hardware encoders, Canghai V2 achieved a 30%+ compression‑rate advantage at 30 fps, saving 47.8% of the bitrate; at 60 fps and 120 fps the savings were 37.7% and 34.6% respectively.

Canghai V1 Deployment and Legacy

Launched in 2021, the Canghai V1 H.265 chip won all first‑place metrics in the previous MSU competition and has been deployed at massive scale in Tencent Cloud live‑streaming services. Tens of thousands of chips are operating in data centers, delivering high‑compression H.265 encoding that has saved billions of yuan in storage and bandwidth costs.

Canghai V2 Hardware Encoder Architecture

Canghai V2 builds on the parallel encoding architecture of V1 and adds a suite of innovations to support the next‑generation H.266 standard. Implemented on FPGA, the prototype supports real‑time encoding from 30 fps to 120 fps. Key architectural features include:

Multi‑scale encoding unit decision

Multi‑level high‑precision motion search

Affine motion compensation

Screen‑content coding (IBC)

Full‑rate distortion optimization

Efficient adaptive quantization

Loop filter (ALF)

The design integrates Tencent’s advanced rate‑control algorithms, reducing computational complexity by an order of magnitude while maintaining industry‑leading compression efficiency. It can handle 4K video at 120 fps or higher in real time.

Soft‑Hardware Co‑Design and Flexibility

The V2 solution introduces rich interrupt and algorithm‑control interfaces, allowing software to dynamically select encoding modes and quantization parameters. This flexibility improves subjective visual quality and further boosts compression ratios. Additionally, V2 supports pre‑analysis and post‑processing modules that can be offloaded to the CPU, enabling parallel processing for stages where pure hardware would sacrifice compression efficiency.

SOC Video Solution and Cloud Integration

While the current FPGA prototype validates the high‑compression capabilities, an ASIC version of Canghai V2 is under development and is expected to deliver even better compression performance. The ASIC will provide a full‑stack SOC video solution, combining industry‑leading H.265/H.266 encoding with comprehensive hardware video processing capabilities.

Tencent Cloud integrates this technology into its Media Processing Service (MPS), offering transcoding, enhancement, snapshot, content understanding, and moderation functions via public‑cloud, private‑cloud, and SDK/LIB deployments. Leveraging AI‑driven dynamic encoding, MPS can reduce storage and bandwidth consumption by over 50% without perceptible quality loss, bringing the benefits of Canghai V2 to a wide range of enterprise customers.