Transcoding Overview

The Centralised Transcoding Farm (CTF) is a centralised scalable solution for the fully automated format conversion of digital media. It is aimed at media content owner and aggregators who need to re-purpose media into multiple formats.

The system has been designed to be fully automated, with quality control limits placed at each logical step. It is highly scalable and able to respond quickly to very rapid increases in the throughput of media. It boasts excellent on-line connectivity for rapid ingest of media and resides on the SOHONET network for ingest from media partners. The system is maintained by onsite staff for rapid response to support enquiries and enjoys 24/7 engineer support.

The system is designed to be used by non-expert operators, in conjunction with a complete training programme and with optional remote support from experts.

The Farm

The Farm consists of multiple encoding nodes which are controlled by the central transcoding job manager. Distributed transcoding with the CTF provides maximum flexibility, future-proofing and complete interoperability. The CTF allows the automated processing of high-volume transcoding tasks, as well as the ability to prioritize special case jobs.

The XML-based API allows complete workflow integration.

Control

The Stream UK CTF is designed to be used by non-expert operators whilst allowing complete control for expert users of the system. The intuitive web interface allows you to control all aspects of the transcoding process from ingest, filtering, encode, quality control, alerting and onward dispatch.

Connectivity

The CTF enjoys excellent online connectivity and direct access to the SOHONET for the very fastest transfer of source to the system. For individual clients this can be extended to include VPN, VLAN and private interconnects.

Best of Breed

Industry leading transcoding software making groundbreaking improvements to speed and quality.

At its heart the engine is based on the Rhozet Carbon Server which has been extended to include dedicated mobile and flash components and multithreaded to enable complete scalability.

How it Works

Media is standardly fed into the system via FTP (other digital delivery mechanisms can be easily included) or following the Stream UK tape handling process. Once media is ready to be transcoded a user is presented with the following options;

• Place the media in a predefined watch folder to initiate fully automated transcoding and delivery
• Set-up and run a special-case encoding using a intuitive web interface.

Once the jobs are logged they are sent to a central dispatch engine which allocates CPU cycles across worker machines and complete the transcoded in line with priorities. Alerts and forward dispatch rules are applied to each job.

Quality Control

The CTF has automated quality control mechanisms built on the Tektronics Cerify™ and the Inlet Semaphore™ platforms. If source content does not meet pre-defined quality levels, the operator is notified, and given the option to re-submit. For transcoded content that does not meet the output quality control, a full set of diagnostics are presented.

Cerify™ is the world's first fully automated system for verifying/checking content prior to transmission or use. All aspects are checked, including compliance/correctness to video/audio standards, video formats, resolutions, bitrates and video quality.

Semaphore™ analyzes digital media content in Windows Media (WMV), VC-1 or AVC (H.264/MPEG-4).

Codecs

MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.263, H.264, DV25, DV50, DVCPro, JPEG-2000, FLV, HDV, MXF, GXF, LXF, MOV, WMV, ASF, AVI, VOB, 3GPP, 3G2.

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