DIY Friday: IPTV
Do you want to create and deliver IPTV content? It may not be as expensive or complicated as you’d expect.
You don’t need a professional studio or a souped-up computer running thousands of dollars of software. Just go open-source:
The ‘Open Source IPTV Production Suite’ is an ensemble of high-level animation, 3D, compositing and editing tools that are available as free, open source GPL applications. However, this is not a direct attempt to duplicate the production tools found in Apple’s Final Cut Studio. It’s an attempt to create a fully functional, professional software suite that is capable of generating high end VFX and 3D animation like those found in Shake and Motion and Maya. Don’t be fooled, just because the software is open source doesn’t mean that it isn’t of professional grade.
This production suite "recipe" links to a variety of programs, from GIMP, an open-source Photoshop clone, to Jahshaka a video editing platform, to Audacity, a audio editor. All of these component are free and open-source (meaning that there is a community constantly improving the product).
So, you’ve created the content, now what do you do with it?
Besides the potential of video over the Internet, thousands of schools, businesses, and churches regularly use their own video networks internally.
But until recently, running video and audio over such a network was tough to pull off. Why? RF-modulated analog video, a common solution that’s still in wide use, can be expensive to set up and technically challenging to maintain. It also suffers from limited, VHS-level resolution. And what about two-way interactivity? Forget it. Many such installations simply make use of another analog technology — a telephone line — to return audio.
But over the last decade, the introduction of MPEG-based hardware (MPEG-1 became a standard in 1992) slowly started to solve the problem of delivering good-quality video over closed networks that a business might use, for example, to deliver training. Buyers of MPEG-based systems, however, still faced outlays for gear including servers, encoders, and decoders to send video to computer screens and television sets.
NAB 2000 changed all that. “At the show, you saw the first practical, dedicated AV hardware that employed IP technology,” says Joe Mendonca, director for streaming and video over IP solutions at North Haven, Conn.-based HB Communications. “This dramatically changed the way we could move audio and video over a network, simplifying installation and making it easy for our customers to use.”
What changed? Although streaming video over the Internet was possible via a new generation of PC cards, the actual video and audio compression was still very compute intensive, making realtime use impractical and production-time-consuming. But by the end of the ’90s, improved technology such as DSP chipsets had enabled realtime compression of video and audio signals.
Combining that compute power with TCP/IP (the technology behind data transmission over the Internet) means that video and audio can be just as flexible in their distribution as anything else that goes over the Internet.
There are further benefits. Since IP gear can use the same Ethernet networks that already exist in many of today’s businesses, schools, and other institutional settings, there’s a built-in distribution network. That networking technology is far cheaper and easier to deploy and manage than single-use cabling such as the coax used by RF-based video distribution systems.
In addition to giving some encouragement (and history), the above article also details some hardware and software solutions for IPTV network delivery, mainly VBrick and Winnov.
Also, Ruckus Wirless provides a wirless option worth considering.
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