Digital Rapids Just Gets It

By the time this NAB is over, I’ll have seen at least five companies that produce enterprise class streaming encoding tools, and each has a different flavor. I left Digital Rapids booth thinking, “man, this company just gets it.”

For example, the two most important encoding features that streaming producers now need are the ability to export in Adobe’s new F4V format, and to access the Windows Media Video encoding tweaks that until recently were available only via the WMV PowerToy or by encoding using Microsoft’s command line interface. Not surprisingly, version 2.5 of Digital Rapid’s StreamPro and StreamEnterprise support both features, as well as GXF and MXF input support, also increasingly important capabilities. Digital Rapids also announced new integration features with Rimage DVD/Blu-ray recorder/printers that lets their customers burn DVDs from the Digital Rapids software.

The other product that caught my eye was the Digital Rapids Broadcast Manager that could be a huge help for companies encoding and distributing high volumes of live streams. It provides a great preview capability of all sources (see the screen), automated failover should any encoding node fail and visual scheduling for encoding tasks.