What do I like more than something that works the way it should right out of the box? Something that is easy to use and understand. Such is the case with Digital Rapids StreamZ streaming encoder.
First a little background. I spend a fair portion of my week encoding and streaming live broadcasts for the University I teach at. These are usually news and public affairs shows, but occasionally I’ll be in charge of streaming something larger. Currently I have a dedicated computer using a three-year-old Osprey card to encode the media via a DV input, and an even older version of RealProducer to encode the files for the web. [an error occurred while processing this directive]While this kludge does work well, there are a couple of drawbacks – the dedicated computer takes up too much room, the encoder card only allows one video signal to come in at a time, we can only encode to one format, and the operator of this system must sit in the control room and start and stop the encoding process manually.
On the outside…
The StreamZ DRC-1500 system that I reviewed comes in a 1RU sized PC that ran Windows XP, which was great because it solved the issue of space in the control room. Installed, you would hardly know that a powerful computer sat in your rack next to all of your broadcasting gear. The StreamZ includes most of the features you would find on a normal computer and even has removable hard drives in case you need to swap one of your storage drives out. If you are sending the signal from the StreamZ to your streaming server and streaming archive, I doubt you will need to swap drives out too much. The only minor annoyance I could find with the way the hardware was designed was that it only had the ability to connect a USB mouse instead of a PS/2. |
| Removable drives are available should you find your archive drive getting too full. |
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| Slim yet with all the connections you need to get your streaming video out to the world. |
As far as input/output goes, the StreamZ seems to accept nearly ever single connection out there; Component, Composite, Y/C, SDI, DV, balanced and unbalanced audio, you will have no problems connecting your video source to the system. For my tests, I looped out of our Program VTR to the StreamZ via FireWire, and also tested with Y/C and unbalanced audio. If this were a permanent installation, I would stick with DV or component video/balanced audio. Depending on the system you purchase, you can have dual video signals coming into the StreamZ for encoding. For example, if you are one of those stations that have multiple channels and need to encode two program feeds, or you want to have a program feed and a behind the scenes feed, or even want to stream an audio only feed and a video/audio feed, then you would be able to do it with the multi-card system like the DRC-2500.
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| Nearly every single connection under the sun is part of this system. No need to worry if your format will be supported, chances are it will. |
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