[AG-TECH] Have we looked at vBrick?

[Brian Chee]

MPEG-2 has software based decoders, but to get a reliable single stream
you need at least a PIII/600.

MPEG-1 is much more reasonable and the vbrick also does that....as well as
the Optivisions, the Minvervas and other such hardware based codecs.  The
Minverva, Optivision and the Vbrick all have appliance like devices that
either encode or decode and some have a combo of both.  Most are embedded
linux or similar OS's that are dedicated just that that purpose.  They're
pretty nice and all of them can be setup for either unicast or multicast.

The Optivision Pro Units (4RU rackable) can do multi destination unicast
with a huge upper limit (I've tried 20) of unicast destinations. The pro
units also can have multiple encode and decode boards installed.

/brian chee


University of Hawaii at Manoa
Department of Information and Computer Sciences
Advanced Network Computing Laboratory (ANCL)
1680 East-West Road, Room 311
Honolulu, HI  96822
Voice: 808-956-5797       Email: chee at hawaii.edu
Brian J.S. Chee, CNE/CNI
http://ancl.ics.hawaii.edu

On Tue, 22 May 2001, Bill Nickless wrote:

> Tim Ward of NWU mentioned vBrick on another email list.  They make
> self-contained boxes that have Ethernets and NTSC jacks on them, which do
> MPEG-2 encoding and decoding.
>
> http://www.vbrick.com/main/home.html
>
> Remind me: what's the problem with converting to mpeg-2?  Is it the encode
> problem (expensive) or the fact that mpeg-2 decode is more expensive than
> h.261 decode?
>
> ===
> Bill Nickless    http://www.mcs.anl.gov/people/nickless      +1 630 252 7390
> PGP:0E 0F 16 80 C5 B1 69 52 E1 44 1A A5 0E 1B 74 F7     nickless at mcs.anl.gov
>
>