Kulabyte’s TimeSlice™ technology enables live and faster than real-time, 2-pass Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding, which is a first for the video industry. This revolutionary technology enables industry-standard codecs to perform at the highest quality, with less bandwidth, and faster-than-real-time performance.

The above attributes are achieved because Kulabyte enables almost any codec to stream high-quality video over a fixed bandwidth network without any dropped frames. Being codec independent means that Kulabyte can work with codecs such as Flash VP6, H.264, WM9 (VC-1), MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and others. Kulabyte even enables live encoding using codecs that were not engineered for real-time use.

Kulabyte works by dividing a file into short time slices and independently encodes each time slice with two-pass VBR. The time slice can be anywhere from less than a second up to the size of the targeted client size buffer, typically around 5 seconds.

With traditional one or two-pass VBR encoding, the Q value is the same throughout an entire video stream. With Kulabyte, a specific 2PVBR bit rate is applied individually to each time slice and then the Q of each time slice is normalized to meet the specified output bit rate. The result is a constant bit rate (CBR) compatible stream that is guaranteed to not drop any frames!