dicas and Wowza Media Systems unveil multiple bit rate live Flash streaming

dicas, the German MPEG-4 experts, and Wowza Media Systems, a US-based developer of Flash streaming media server software, have announced the interoperability of dicas MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 encoders with Wowza Media Server Pro. Broadcasters, operators and enterprises delivering IPTV and streaming services now have at their disposal a versatile and cost-effective conduit for the live distribution of broadcast-quality video content in multiple bit rates to Internet-connected Flash player clients.

Wowza Media Server Pro is an award-winning solution for Flash streaming that counts more than 15,000 global licensees across a broad range of industries. Its popularity is due in large part to its exclusive ability to stream to Flash players using both RTMP and non-RTMP live encoders.

"We knew that a server allowing non-Flash RTP/RTSP encoders for H.264 live Flash streaming would be an extremely attractive product," says David Stubenvoll, CEO & Co-Founder, Wowza Media Systems. "But we never foresaw such a broad and deep affection for what we have done. Now the combination of Wowza Pro with dicas2020 multiple bit rate ability offers customers a great way to stream Flash while simplifying encoding infrastructure and reducing cost."

"The compatibility with Wowza Media Server Pro is a natural advancement of our product portfolio," says Sebastian Moeritz, CEO at dicas. "In addition to the dicas Flash plug-in allowing for H.264 live Flash streaming over RTMP, clients now have the choice of using RTMP or delivering streams to the media server at multiple bit rates over a standard non-Flash transport protocol that best fits with their needs."
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The recently launched dicas2020 multi-format encoder is a perfect complement to Wowza Media Server Pro. The dicas2020 encodes a single input channel into up to six parallel output signals at varying bit rates (adjustable from 40 kbps to 6 Mbps), resolution (from QCIF to SDTV), and transport protocols (RTMP, RTP/RTSP, MPEG-TS). Wowza Media Server Pro can ingest streams over any transport protocol from the dicas2020 encoder, selecting from a bit rate appropriate to the user's bandwidth and reliably deliver it over RTMP to the Flash player.

Unrestricted multi-format live streaming with the dicas2020

German MPEG-4 video coding expert dicas will add a new product to the successful dicas2000 hardware series at the beginning of next week. The dicas2020 is a multi-format encoder that enables broadcasters, content providers and satellite operators to deliver one input channel of video and audio simultaneously to various end-user applications such as set-top boxes, PCs, broadcast-quality decoders, handheld devices and Flash Players.

"The dicas2020 convinces with enormous flexibility" says Klaas Schuur, CTO at dicas. "It's a single 1RU encoder, but it creates a user-defined number of output formats for different clients." For each output format users can continuously adjust bit rates (from 40 kbps to 6 Mbps) and chose between various video (MPEG-4, MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, H.263) and audio codecs (AAC, AMR), transport protocols (MPEG-2 transport stream, RTP and RTMP for Flash) as well as resolutions (from QCIF to full D1, PAL and NTSC, interlaced and progressive displays). The dicas2020 supports for Adobe's Flash format as well as 3GPP for streaming to mobile devices