Communitek Video Systems announces the debut of the Minicaster, a standalone encoding system designed specifically for live streaming of HD and SD content for Internet video broadcasts and IPTV applications.
- Offering real-time MPEG4/H.264, Adobe Flash™ and Windows Media™ encoding, this compact device is billed as a solution for live broadcasts from both field and studio locations. Applications include live sports and concert events, high-quality video conferencing for business, government and medical applications, as well as worldwide distribution of television and radio broadcasts over the Internet.
- Streams can be generated at bit rates ranging from 100 kbps to 15 Mbps in real-time from HD-SDI, SD-SDI, S-Video or Composite Video sources with either discrete or embedded audio. The Minicaster can also be equipped with up to 2 TBytes of internal disk storage for simultaneous archiving of live streams during broadcasts. This self-contained unit, which is capable of operating on AC or DC power, will be featured at the Brick House Video booth N4019 during the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention to be held in Las Vegas April 12-15, 2010.
- Employing an optimalcombination of hardware and software encoding, the Minicaster can be used in any real-time encoding application, including live sports and concert events. Producers are given complete creative control over the compression process, which supports all of the major High and Standard Definition formats used in broadcast, including 1080i, 720p, PAL 625 and NTSC 525. Frame rates include 30, 29.97, 25 and 24 Hz progressive as well as 60 and 59.94 Hz interlaced. Video images can be cropped, scaled, de-interlaced, and formatted for a wide range of software video players. Both 16 x 9 and 4 x 3 aspect ratios are supported, and captions and bitmap logos can be overlaid on the outbound stream. Dual Gigabit Ethernet output ports are provided for high stream capacity and redundancy.
- “The Minicaster integrates the best available technologies from across the video streaming marketplace,” said Brian Isaacson, President of Communitek Video Systems. “We have deployed these units in a number of live webcasts that we have produced and found that their video performance and overall reliability far exceed what is possible with off-the shelf PCs running commercial software packages.”
