Serving up technology

Video servers - sometimes called encoders - primarily convert analogue video to digital format, and sometimes include storage. The term server is confusing, because to some it means a storage device like a computer server and to others it means a device that streams video to the Internet like a web server.

What is commonly called a video server is an encoder. The reason they are called servers is that 95 per cent of the products function as web servers. Eventually the word will fade away and be replaced by the term video encoder.

A video server can be accessed from any computer if the user has its IP address. For installations with multiple servers, it helps to use a video management software that can view multiple servers on the same screen at the same time instead of accessing each one separately from a web browser.

The encoder is hardware with circuit board, a CPU and a power supply. The basic things it has are the input for the camera, the video feed, an RJ45 female socket to plug into the network, and a power source.

During the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, ARD/ZDF, Germany’s largest television station deployed 10 Avid AirSpeed servers for ingest and play out with 96 TB of Avid Unity ISIS shared storage.

France Televisions, the public broadcaster, established a production studio in Beijing for coverage of the Games. The Beijing production included an AirSpeed server for ingest and an Avid Thunder system for multi-channel video live production.

The Avid AirSpeed is a next-generation I/O server is a direct, single channel ingest and single or dual-channel play out system designed to integrate with the Avid non-linear production environment - the most cost-effective and efficient means for the start and finish of a project or getting a story to air.

With AirSpeed, direct acquisition of tapes and live feeds into an Avid Unity shared media network or standalone AirSpeed directly into Avid editing systems without shared storage makes incoming footage available immediately to all contributors.

AirSpeed offers significant time saving at each end of the HD or SD nonlinear workflow. Its compact, modular 3RU form factor reduces space requirements and its proven IT-based design integrates easily with existing equipment, applications, and processes including third-party automation systems.

“The expanded recording and playout capabilities of AirSpeed 2.0 significantly increase the power of an Avid Unity workgroup,” said David Schleifer, vice president of Avid Broadcast and Workgroups.

“AirSpeed offers support for high-quality HD and uncompressed SD formats, expanding its application to encompass more types of video production. What makes AirSpeed especially attractive is that it’s more affordable than similar products on the market. It’s versatile, flexible, easy to use, and enables facilities to significantly increase the efficiency of producing SD and HD material.”

“By adding playout support for popular HD formats and also improving the bandwidth and storage capacity of the system, we’re enabling broadcasters to scale to their playout operations and keep pace with the demand for HD content,” Schleifer added.

Faster, more efficient workflow is the focus for Omneon, and the company has recently won a number of orders on the back of broadcasters’ search for greater efficiencies within file-based environments.

Omneon senior vice-president for products and markets, Geoff Stedman said: “Our goal is to provide a platform for efficient file-based workflows. One of the trends we see is broadcaster needing to quickly re-purpose and deliver their media for multiple platforms.”

German broadcaster Plazamedia is one such example, and has invested in a new Omneon MediaGrid active storage system to provide facility-wide central storage for its ‘Center’, with Omneon Spectrum media servers performing ingest and play out functionality.

The set up devised for Plazamedia ensured that content provided by tape, satellite feed, or file is ingested to existing Omneon Spectrum servers under control of Blue Order media asset management and then sent or imported to two newly installed, fully redundant 24TB MediaGrid units for secure central storage.

Directed by Marquis Medway, MXF IMX 50 files then make the trip from the MediaGrid system to Avid editing and back, at which point the ProXchange application transcode designated files into MPEG LGOP for play out under Pro-Bel Morpheus automation. The MediaGrid system also interfaces with EVS servers and SGL tape library.

“From our perspective, we like to define a video server as a device that provides the ability at minimum to capture and record video and then provide it back for review, as opposed to in general what I would suggest the industry considers an encoder,” asserted Bob Beliles, senior manager, market management, physical security of Cisco.

“An encoder is a device which digitises and compresses video and leaves it at that - that would be your basic function,” Beliles continued. “A function above that would be a device that takes the video, digitises and compresses it, and puts it into a network packet, which is a gateway device, which allows it to connect to a LAN or WAN and ultimately to the Internet and recording platforms.”

These would include digital video recorders (DVRs) and network video recorders (NVRs), he said. Some of these may be hybrids that can have analogue or IP cameras connected to them. Servers also can connect to network-attached storage (NAS) devices or storage area networks (SANs).

Matt Barnette, vice president of sales at AMAG Technology Inc., agreed that video servers should include storage. “A server not only transforms the signal from analogue to digital but also saves the data,” he insists. He added that such a device allows moving more of the system to the edge to reduce cabling costs.

“Our idea was to put the camera out there and put a video server out at that location and be able to connect it to the network wirelessly and have it stream the video back, and you can be recording it or viewing it anywhere you have network connectivity,” he related. “It allows you to increase the flexibility of the design as well as the usability of the system.

“There should be a significant cost savings during installation of the system utilising the network infrastructure already in place, so you don’t have to run cables to all these devices - you simply connect them to the network, and your device is now online,” Barnette pointed out.

He added that some advanced IP cameras are not only performing the server function, but also storing video. “So in essence those cameras have become very intelligent devices at the edge of the network,” he notes. “They are acting in somewhat of a server capacity, where they are storing the video or making some type of intelligent decision.”

“From there, you move up to an analogue camera that has a video server built into it. That video server sometimes is called an encoder, but it’s a single-channel device. The next step up from that is a standalone video server that is often called an encoder and takes from one up to four channels typically,” continued Corbett.

Some video servers are mounted in racks if existing video surveillance systems already are configured to send analogue camera output to centralised locations like control rooms. A 19-inch rack can have a capacity of up to 48 ports or channels.

Such a rack is made up of 12 four-port video servers, each of which does not have a housing and is called a “blade.” Blades only can function in a rack. Other servers are strictly software that can reside on any off-the-shelf computer and perform the functions of a video server.

Because video servers are a transitional technology, Corbett expects the market for them to increase for a while and then drop off.

“As we move more and more to IP cameras, they will come to a point where these have saturated the market, and all the analogue cameras that you want to change to IP have been done,” he predicts. “The newer cameras coming on are IP cameras, which are video servers in themselves.

“It’s hard to say how much time - IP cameras are growing so fast in the marketplace - but over the next five years, there will be a reasonable growth in IP video encoders, and then after that, they’ll just drop off the market,” Corbett forecasts. “They won’t be needed anymore.”

But the number of analogue cameras still in use is high, Barnette points out. “Those aren’t going to go away anytime soon, so over the course of the next five to 10 years, there is going to be a need for hybrid devices to put those cameras on a network,” he concludes. ASIAIMAGE