Haivision today announced its “next-generation” H.264 video encoding platform, the Makito X Series. Haivision says the Makito X Series offers a six-fold increase in encoding power that delivers high quality HD video using half of the bandwidth of comparable encoders.

The Makito X2, a dual channel low-latency HD-SDI H.264 encoder, is the first Haivision product to incorporate the company’s new X Series technology. It can encode up to 12 HD sources (up to 1080p 60Hz) to H.264 within a 1RU of rack space. Supporting High Profile H.264 video compression, the Makito X2 specs say its gets up to twice the picture quality while maintaining the Makito’s 55-millisecond encoding latency — what was the picture quality before? Haivision say the picture quality of the Makito X2 streams are on par with broadcast-quality encoders at higher bitrates, but that remains to be seen.

Makito X2 supports multiple bitrate (MBR) streaming with up to four renditions of each input from 32 Kbps to 25 Mbps at full 1080p 60Hz. Here are all the specs.