Wednesday, April 22, 2009

NAB Follow-up for Streaming and Compression Tools

Here's a Follow-up for Streaming and Compression Tools at NAB 2009. Most of the buzz this NAB was surrounding Microsoft's Smooth Streaming and its implementation in various tools. This looks to be very exciting and allows automatic adjustment to lower or higher datarate for live and on-demand streams. The quality of the streams is impacted by the bandwidth available.

Inlet Technologies has some tools that have implemented the Smooth Streaming for on-demand and live streaming. They also have a tool that provides great post encoding video analysis and called Semaphore. The tool has been out for a while but now it's included in their Armada encoding product that provides large scale encoding. By large scale encoding I'm talking about hundreds and thousands of files being encoding. The tool can do checks at the end to make sure there were no technical issues like dropped frames, audio loss, etc. There are far to many features to list in this blog post. Make sure you visit the Inlet website.

Wowza Media Systems will have a new release of their server that supports Smooth Streaming and Silverlight. I can't wait. The next release will also allow live streaming to the iPhone. Amazing! Check out there website. We'll that's enough for this post. Time to catch a plane.