Archive of the Content Delivery Category

Reel-Exchange Community Manager Craig Erpelding talked with Jon Robbins of Rhozet about transcoding at NAB 2009.

At NAB 2009, Blackmagic Design introduced eight new OpenGear card-based converters that automatically switch between SD, HD, and 3G-SDI video formats. Watch the video.

More videos from Broadcast Engineering TV

Maybe it’s because he’s Canadian, but Dave Ross, CEO of Ottawa-based Ross Video, appears entirely immune from recession fear or NAB shrinkage concerns. In fact, his company’s busy booth (SU1807) is chock full of new product, expansion beyond the company’s core live broadcast production switchers, acquisition announcements, news of the hiring of additional sales staff, and, according to Ross, good profit estimates. He jokes that the company, started decades ago by his father, Canadian broadcast veteran John Ross, is “an overnight success after 35 years.”

But, more seriously, he suggests Ross has strategically tried to “grow ourselves out of the Recession,” and counsels that companies need to build “recession products before a recession hits—make a range of products, so that people will need something out of that range in both good times and lean times.” more

Ensemble Designs has 28 new products at NAB 2009. Cindy Zuelsdorf of Ensemble Designs demonstrates one of them—the company’s new 4500 MPEG transport stream processor for translating DVB-ASI to SMPTE 310M in broadcast and satellite applications. Watch the video.

More videos from Broadcast Engineering TV

Matrox’s CompressHD is the first product that I looked at this year and said “I want that.” It’s a $495 H.264 accelerator card based upon an Amberella chip that you can buy standalone, or will appear in various iterations of Matrox’s popular MXO products. The product integrates with Compressor on the Mac, and Adobe Media Encoder on Windows (but not on the Mac, at least for the first iteration). It accelerates only H.264 encoding, whether for Apple devices, Blu-ray or general streaming.

I saw a demo on the Mac, and I think it will have its greatest success there, at least in the short term. You control the product from Compressor, where it can work either as an integrated codec or like a QuickTime export component. If you use it as a codec, Compressor’s own scaling and deinterlacing functions apply, which his useful if you want to use your old presets and just accelerate encoding. more

Press Release

Wegener, a leading provider of equipment for television, audio, and data distribution networks worldwide, announced it will introduce the Wegener iPump 525 IP media player at the NAB Show 2009 in Las Vegas, April 20-23 at booth #SU7913. Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2009 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

Serendipity on the show floor makes for impromptu sessions. Tuesday I ran into cinematographer Bill Bennett in front of the Sony F35 parked on a dolly in front of Brand Pro’s booth. Not much to say about the F35–35 means its newly developed single CCD is the size of a Super 35mm film frame–except that it’s as impressively thought out as last year’s F23 on which it’s based, and like its double first cousin, Panavision’s Genesis, did once, it sets a new highwater mark in 4:4:4 RGB high-end digital cinematography cameras.

Well, for $250,000 without lens, it ought to. A lot to pay in weak dollars for tighter depth-of-field and better dynamic range than the F23, plus 1-50 fps variable speed in 4:4:4 (compared to F23’s 1-30). But you do get every pixel you pay for. This is a full-on 1920×1080 RGB image—no Bayer interpolation of phantom R and B pixels here, no sir. Leave that to lowly CMOS cameras like the REDs, Silicon Imaging 2Ks and Minis, and Arri D21s (at NAB upgraded from D20 with new 2K RAW data output mode). more

Media Excel was the last company that I saw at NAB, but last was certainly not least in this instance. The company’s real time encoders for mobile, web and IP TV, recently anointed by MTV and MobiTV, looked very, very impressive.

The company targets broadcasters and other very high volume streaming producers and builds their Hera real time encoding boxes using Texas Instruments DaVinci DSP (digital signal processor). The chip is programmable, so it will support later codec updates, and reportedly scary fast. more

As streaming becomes more technologically advanced and complicated, it’s easy to forget that the most basic streaming video-related need for many organizations is to synchronize a video of a speaker with his or her PowerPoint slides. Though Accordent does many more things than this, they offer two of the best products I’ve seen for streaming PowerPoint with video.

The Accordent Capture Station is a computer/appliance you can take with you on site to stream the presentation live, and/or capture it for later streaming. You connect the presenter’s computer to the appliance via a VGA connector to capture the PowerPoint slides, and plug the video feed into an Osprey card. The Accordent software captures and synchronizes the stream, captures it to disk, and can push it out to a remote streaming server. more

Video over cell phones is one of the hottest topics facing video producers, but most organizations lack the technical expertise and/or capital to make it happen. If you’d like to dip your toe in the water, check out the Mobile Video Managed Service from Vidiator.

Operationally, you upload your videos to the Vidiator site, who transcodes them and sends you a link to post on your web site. Or, you can create your own mobile-phone accessible web-site using Vidiator tools. In the booth, the company captured video from a web-cam, uploaded it to their service, and then transmitted it to a cell phone in the booth where it played with minimal latency and good quality.

I saw the Vidiator folks in a 10×10 booth in the Central Hall, which initially raised my eyebrows, but learned that they’re owned by Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, a $40 billion Hong Kong company. Hutchison developed the cellular streaming technology for in-house use, and is now taking it out of house via Vidiator. Both the service and technology felt mature and well thought out, and at $99/month for 10,000 minutes of cellular viewing, it’s certainly affordable.