Navori's new software pushing broadcast-quality video out of $350 PCs

The Swiss software company Navori doesn’t make a lot of noise in the marketplace, but they quietly do a lot of business – with installs in 90 countries and some 75,000 active licenses. That number thoroughly blows away the installed base of a lot of much noisier competitors.

The company IS making some noise this week, ahead of the big Integrated Systems Europe trade show at the start of February, about new software it is bring to market. Navori says its new QL digital signage software suite makes playing broadcast-quality video possible even on $300-$350 PCs.

That’s a big deal from the standpoint of cost, obviously, as the media players spec’d by a lot of companies usually cost quite a bit more. Certainly, a lot of software companies have their product running on low-end PCs, but the playback quality is also low-end in most cases – with dropped video frames, tickers that don’t really tick, transitions that look ghastly, and so on.

Navori says the new QL suite uses a proprietary graphics rendering engine to optimize how even cheap PCs play out full HD video and other rich media files.

“We invested the time and resources to introduce a solution that makes even a $350 PC capable of playing back flawless, seamless HD programming with banners, titling, transparency and overlays of unprecedented quality. We offer a true Broadcast TV experience, a face lift for the digital signage medium that was overdue. To achieve this, we designed our own proprietary graphic engine,” says Jerome Moeri, Chairman of Navori International SA, in a release. “The Navori QL platform we’ll be showing at ISE differs from any product now on the market. QL is easy to use and affordable, but doesn’t require compromises.”

While competing software products offer playback accuracy down to each second of video content, Navori QL’s media playback engine has frame by frame video accuracy down to 1/30th of a second. The momentary black gaps common to most systems when playing back-to-back videos are gone using QL. If required, those gaps would need to be designed and programmed back in.

“We’re proud of our Swiss heritage, and we try to apply the same precision and quality to our software platform as the companies that have made our country’s timepieces so famous,” explains Moeri. “Our idea of Swiss Movement is efficient design that leads to extraordinary performance.”

Moeri noted that his Lausanne-based software engineering team reduced demands on computer processing power to roughly half that of competing platforms, elevating playback quality but also increasing the reliability of players by reducing and controlling CPU usage.

Navori says other highlights of QL include:

• Broadcast-level media cropping, titling and transitions;
• Running Intel’s i7 processor, it is technically possible to drive discrete, full HD content to as many as 12 screens driven from a single playback unit;
• The breadth of a native Windows desktop application, but via web browser;
• Integrated creative toolset and templates;
• Content automation tools that don’t need coding skills from the operator;
• A la carte pricing.

The official launch of Navori QL is at ISE in Amsterdam, Feb. 1-3. Navori has a booth (#12E82). The company will also be at Digital Signage Expo (booth 2028).