a blog by Peter Leonard
We do a fair bit of live webcasting in my office, usually with Real's suite of audio and video codecs and streaming server. We've had a standalone PC hooked up to our video mixer to encode the analog video into Real format, usually at a few different bandwidth rates for modem as well as broadband users. The resulting video stream is sent to the RTSS server which then bounces the stream out to anyone who requests it. This PC has to be configured with a minimal set of software, must be up-to-date and virus-free, and is susceptible to all the normal maladies a desktop PC usually is - software hiccups, hardware glitches, and driver conflicts.
There is another approach: a special box, with an embedded OS and firmware settings, which is dedicated to video compression. vBrick Systems manufactures such hardware. Roughly the size of a flattened shoebox, they are plain black boxes with no VGA, keyboard or mouse ports, just Video-In and Ethernet.