Third Party Software - Page 3

A large number of third party software companies have sprung up recently offering encoding solutions. Those discussed here are by no means a comprehensive list, but reflects some of the more popular software packages.

Media Cleaner Pro 5: This package is available on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms. MCP5 is the most flexible program on the market. It allows you to adjust every possible setting to optimize your streaming video. More importantly it allows you to preview these adjustments in real time so that you can see what makes your video look the best.

Preprocessing is also a strength. MCP5 allows you to do preprocessing on the video to remove artifacts like interlacing and preprocess audio to remove background noise.

When we talked about Windows Media Encoder we talked about how it was limited to handling one file at a time. MCP5 can handle files in batch jobs. The program can take large numbers of source files and process them to one set of encoding specifications or it can take them in smaller chunks and run different encoding specs. Don't worry about overwriting multiple files with the same name because MCP5 will use numeric increments to differentiate files.

All in all when it comes to getting the best possible encoding MCP5 is the best program on the market. Now that Media 100 owns the software, I expect it to be better integrated into an end-to- end solution.

Adobe Premiere 6: I used to use Adobe Premiere for video editing back on CD-ROM and since it was the first video interface I learned, I've always been partial to it. But over the years Adobe has let Premiere fall behind in the streaming media market. Version 6 may change all this with some vast improvements.

First, Premiere has finally made IEEE 1394 (Firewire) support native. This allows you to dump video from a DV camera directly into Premiere without having to digitize it using a video card! Great stuff.

Adobe has also integrated streaming media more closely using a version of Media Cleaner Pro especially designed for Premiere. I find this odd since Media 100, owner of MCP5, and Adobe compete in this market. It should be noted that Windows Media is NOT supported on the Macintosh platform, a serious draw back.

Markers for doing chapterization can now be embedded in the video directly on the Premiere timeline. This allows you to create synchronized slide shows. Premiere can even create the HTML that makes up these slide shows.

Premiere has made some advances with version 6, but better solutions exist including Media 100i with MCP5 at its core.

Vegas Video: Sonic Foundry, who has traditionally been an audio editing software producer, produces this package. Remember that we talked about Microsoft's Windows Media On-Demand Producer? Well Microsoft and Sonic Foundry teamed up and WMOP is a stripped-down Windows Media-only version of Vegas Video.

Vegas Video is capable of exporting Windows Media or Real Media though there are few options that allow you to tweak the quality settings.

Windows Media On-Demand Producer was a great tool when offered for free, but when the price suddenly goes to $629 I would look elsewhere.

Scalable Solutions

Streaming video production has moved beyond simple encoding to become a major business. As it has grown, major companies such as CNN have demanded systems that could encode video at a rate equal to the quantity of video they produced. To handle this, a number of systems have emerged that attempt to take streaming video encoding and create an Enterprise Class solution. Let's take a look at some of the early leaders.

Flip Factory: This program was only released early in 2001, but holds great promise of being an Enterprise Class encoding solution. Flip Factory eliminates much of the manual work from encoding by automating all the steps between the source file and placing the encoded video on the server.

It does this all through a Web based easy-to-use interface. Factories are set up that will take a source file and apply certain rules to it, such as convert to Windows Media at 300 kb/s at 320x240 resolution and 24 frames per second. Once done the file is encoded as part of a larger batch job and FTPed to the proper server.

The encoders are present as Windows NT processes on the server so they are very stable and can be controlled remotely through the Web interface even if they are across the country.

Our initial install had a few bugs, but I would expect later versions to be very solid.

Anystream: This company spun out of ICE, a DSP board producer that created acceleration boards for Adobe After Effects and other processor-hungry programs. Anystream's product has been released for over a year and has undergone testing and refinement at companies such as NFL Films and CNN. CNN uses Anystream's Agility Enterprise Encoding platform to encode massive amounts of video each day.

The Agility platform allows for remote control of external video decks as well as ingesting other digital file formats. It has the capability of outputting in Real, Windows Media and Quicktime at multiple data rates. Anystream's platform is built on Web standards and includes sophisticated preprocessing of video to produce a superior product. Anystream's platform is one of the more sophisticated available in today's market.

Virage: Virage is more than just an encoding platform. Their technology makes video searchable. It does this using several methods. The first, most reliable and easiest method is by extracting the closed captioning information from Line 21 of the Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI). When this text is combined with time code information it allows the user to search through the video by keyword and jump directly to that point in the video. This is great technology for television networks that include closed captioning, however it doesn't do anything for enterprises that don't have closed captioning written to their video.

The second method is voice recognition. With this technique the program tries to recognize the speaker on the tape. The software can get about 50% accuracy with a midwestern accent that has been clearly articulated into a lapel microphone. This works acceptably well for news broadcasts. However, the video generally shot at a corporation is going to involve a variety of accents and audio qualities. At this point voice recognition is all but unusable.

Virage's encoding system does allow for some scalability, though not to the degree offered by Anystream. It also allows the encoder to incorporate metadata about the video that makes the video searchable and in the end more useful.

Encoding - Page 2
Windows Media: Encoding and Serving
Serving - Page 4