Jul202011July 20, 2011January 18, 20154Commentsby Nicolas Weil

Server-Side Stream Repackaging [Streaming Video Technologies Panorama, part 2]

Posted in Repackaging, Streaming

There are basically two ways to sustain the extensive growth of video formats that you must, as a media distributor, serve to your different target clients’ devices : the most common answer is to choose the best in breed most-powerful encoders to prepare all the target formats during the content preparation time, but you can adopt a different approach saying that you want to prepare your contents once and have the distribution part of the overall workflow take care of the repackaging and protection of the contents on the fly.
This alternative approach means : less files to manage in the main production workflow, less storage, less bandwidth to populate the origin servers, smaller time to contents’ online availability and easier support for new formats – shortly said, an agile path. Potentially a risky one, but quite attractive…


Jul032011July 3, 2011October 26, 20216Commentsby Nicolas Weil

Hardware-accelerated Encoding [Streaming Video Technologies Panorama, part 1]

Posted in Encoding, Streaming

Maybe some of you remember the Tarari Encoder Accelerator for Windows Media which came on market in 2005 as a FPGA loaded PCI board. It was a 10K$ investment but it could seriously boost your encoder performances and it was a transparent solution for all encoders integrating Windows Media SDK. That was maybe the only real reliable option to do HD encoding decently at that time. More confidential were the Ambric cards for accelerating MainConcept H.264 and MPEG-2 SDK, which were found to be working with Inlet Armada transcoding farm.

Since these days, Tarari boards vanished, Windows Media encoding has been somehow outshined by H.264 and CPU performances have made great jumps, but the needs for hardware accelerated encoding solutions is still there…