I have a case where we need a portable h264 hardware encoder for live streaming.
I’ve looked on different solutions, including FASTvdo.
In this case, we need to supply a RTMP stream to wowza from the hardware encoder. Here we also specify the output Streamname and RTMP server.
This is for sports, so the picture is also moving really fast.
Any suggestions? Can we maybe go for a high end desktop computer with FMLE installed?
Thanks in advance
That’s prettymuch what I use…
We’ve got a small road case that has a 1U 19" rack server in it (very shallow server) with an ITX motherboard and Core2 Duo CPU. Runs FMLE to do the encode and has a video capture card in it. Seems to work well, can be checked as luggage, etc. The case we normally use is 4U in height, so it can hold 2 encoders and a patch panel on the front for hooking the A/V connectors up. (only power & ethernet need to be hooked up from the back).
–Chris
Henry,
Thanks for the info - I’ve played around with the Makito, and it’s a nice little unit (although IP configuration for it is a little arcane). Most of the streaming I do is RTMP, and just recently acquired a couple of Kulabyte systems based on Dell’s R210 server + BlackMagic Decklink Studio, which is reasonably compact, but not nearly as compact as the Haivision gear.
Viewcast makes some pretty compact units in their Niagara line as well, but I think you have to stay SD to stay compact.
Christr,
Thank you for your answer.
We just put together a brand new i7 quad core 3,2 GHZ machine with high end components, in a micro-atx cabinet - with a nice handle to carry it around!
As for capture card, I’ve looked at Black Magic Intensify, since there are several good reports on FMLE compability, and it’s actually not that expensive.
I’m curious what kind of events you broadcast? In our case we have live sports events with many moving parts in the image.
Do you do HD ?
Hi Guys.
sorry for the late reply.
I’ve given up lugging computers around to do software encoding. instead I found an HD hardware encoder not much bigger than your hand. The connections are basically power, video in and h.264 out (ts over udp or rtp, direct rtp or quicktime). Works beautifully on my wowza servers. It is the Makito HD or Barracuda SD from Haivision.com and it is documented here in the wowza forums.
When i do a live event I bring just the encoder, a small network hub and my laptop for configuration and monitoring. It all fits in my knapsack
Henry
The Blackmagic cards are nice. We use the Intensity Pro and Decklinks here. However, they have issues in Wirecast & VidBlaster so anyone using those apps should probably avoid the Blackmagic stuff for now. (or avoid the apps… ). They work fine in FMLE, the only ‘gotcha’ to these cards is that your frame rate is bound to the proper framerate of the video signal.
I don’t really do any HD. Tho sometimes we have HD source, but we don’t stream in real HD. (Tho many call some of the stuff we do ‘HD’ because it’s better then what many think is normal for webstreams).
We’ve found the regular dual core’s with at least 4meg cache and 2gig of RAM is fine for most feeds upto 640x480 at 1500kbps video rate. (with say a 320x200 backup at 200kbps video rate). The i7’s will be nice if we ever do go with real HD, but very few of our end-users can actually handle a constant stream coming in at greater then 2mbps.
As for our events, we do just about anything. A few months ago we did a private stream so a movie director could remote-direct his film since he was having travel issues. Got a golf tournament coming up this week where we’ll be handling the live streaming of press events. Sometimes do local band ‘concerts’, etc. 95% of what we do are all one-off type events. Only a couple of customers who stream all the time ,or have constant on-demand type content coming from us.
–Chris