Archive for the 'RipCode V4' Category

RipCode Introduces Real-Time Stream Transcoding Solution for Live Mobile Video

Published by
Brendon Mills
at July 29, 2008 in Real-Time Stream Transcoding, On Demand Transcoding, Mobile Video, Transcoding and RipCode V4. 0 Comments    Email This Post

Hi Everyone -

As most frequent readers will know, RipCode has grown into a leader and innovator in the On-Demand Transcoding market built around the strength of our flagship product, the RipCode Video Transcoding Appliance.  But today, I’m excited to announce that we’re taking a new step in the evolution of RipCode.  In addition to offering on-demand transcoding of stored content, we’re introducing RipCode’s Real-Time Stream Transcoding solution, focused on the transcoding and delivery of live mobile streaming of broadcast content.  With this addition, RipCode has created a powerful dual-application transcoding platform enabling our customers to reach more markets with a single transcoding appliance.

RipCode’s Real-Time Stream Transcoding solution has the largest ingest capability of any solution on the market, with up to 8 simultaneous single or multi-program streams. And, it supports high-density output for video delivery over current and next generation broadcast networks including: 3GPP and 3GPP2, DVB-H, MBMS, ATSC, and Qualcomm MediaFlo.

Additionally, RipCode has added an optional Video Feed Ingest component to provide full-resolution ingests of premium audio and video via an SD SDI channel.

One of the first use cases of RipCode’s new Real-Time Stream Transcoding solution will be through our partnership with NextWave. NextWave Wireless is a global provider of mobile multimedia and wireless broadband technologies, they’re collaborating with RipCode to supply live video stream transcoding for their UMTS MBMS based TDtv™ solution.  You’ll be hearing more about this later this year.

For more information on our new Real-Time Stream Transcoding solution, you can read the press release or visit the solution page on our website. This is an exciting new pivot point for RipCode and our customers as we continue to innovate and push the capabilities of video transcoding.

Challenges in Supporting New Encode Profiles

Published by
Brendon Mills
at May 29, 2008 in On Demand Transcoding, Transcoding and RipCode V4. 0 Comments    Email This Post

 I’ve talked to a lot of companies recently about their video transcoding needs and most are eager to support an increased number of encoding profiles. But as their video library grows, they forsee challenges in encoding their back catalog to support new profiles while keeping up with transcoding their daily ingest. In this video, I’ve whiteboarded an example of the pre-transcoding challenge. I think it will help further your understanding as to why companies with growing video libraries should consider On-Demand Transcoding to reduce the cost and complexities of delivering video to multiple formats.

RipCode Demos On-Demand Transcoding at TI Developer Conference

Published by
Jacqui Galow
at April 11, 2008 in DSPs, On Demand Transcoding, Transcoding, RipCode V4 and Uncategorized. 0 Comments    Email This Post

RipCode CEO, Brendon Mills talks with Texas Instruments’ Niels Anderskouv while demoing On-Demand Transcoding for mobile as part of the Texas Intstruments’ Worldwide Developer Conference.

Value of the Video Long Tail

Published by
Brendon Mills
at January 21, 2008 in On Demand Transcoding, IPTV, Mobile Video, Internet Video, RipCode V4, Transcoding and Uncategorized. 0 Comments    Email This Post

In a recent Mashable post by Mark Hopkins, he discusses the intrinsic value of the video long tail, in particular the difference between current event and news-based video versus video produced for enjoyment.  At RipCode, the video long tail is a topic that we are very familiar with. 

When you talk about video long tail content, it’s important to understand the unique challenge to content creators, aggregators and network operators striving to expand their video distribution by offering support for a greater number of devices extending their reach to the “3 screens” – Internet, mobile and IPTV.

Each device supporting video playback maintains one or multiple media profiles defining what types of content is supported.  These media profiles are differentiated by many variables including resolution size, codec implementation, aspect ratio, scan method, and network protocol.  So it’s no longer just about making long tail video available for viewing on a PC, but to any video enabled device.  

Pre-transcoding video can be a practical approach when working with smaller video libraries supporting a limited number of supported profiles; however, it becomes problematic for content aggregators who have large libraries and ingest a high volume of content on a daily basis.  As the size of a video library and number of supported profiles grow, so does the data storage requirements.

 As we talk about on our website, by transcoding video on-demand, content creators can realize value from not just the most popular and widely viewed video, but from the video long tail as well.  Until now, it was deemed too resource intensive to pre-transcode and store less widely viewed titles in multiple file formats – like the news-based video that Mark talks about in his blog.  But by changing the nature of transcoding from a “pre-transcode” methodology to one where video is transcoded only when a customer requests it, this opens the door for less popular content, enabling content creators and syndicators to monetize their entire video library.

The Internet Video Format War Rages On

Published by
Peter Anzalone
at November 6, 2007 in IPTV, Internet TV, On Demand Transcoding, Mobile Video, Transcoding, Internet Video and RipCode V4. 0 Comments    Email This Post

Peter AnzaloneHi all.  I’m Peter Anzalone, AVP of Product Marketing for RipCode and another new voice on the RipCode blog.  Does anyone remember the good old View-Master?  How about family vacation slides on a slide projector?  Okay, I’m dating myself but the point is there always are current and future emerging technologies driven by personal and home entertainment needs.  In today’s context, the advent of online videos has dramatically compressed the time between technologies and increased our options.  The result is not only the lack of a central point or device to view videos but the advancement of anywhere, anytime and any business model fueled by the marketplace.

In his recent article “Format Wars Forever,” Damien Stolarz does a nice job of outlining the history of warring formats.  It’s an informative, short read that is well worth your time.  Here’s the gist: Unlike the days of format standardization which created a mass market for $20 DVD players, online video players are simply software.  As such, just about any savvy programmer can now create their own software video player for any PC or mobile device.  Additionally, beyond the indispensable codec, it’s the varied business and distribution models that also steer this process.  Consequently, both time proven broadcast methods and fixed price models are no longer enough to satisfy the content providers, grownups on an airplane or teens on the go with their modern day View Master, iPod, smart phone, PlayStation Portable, PC or HDTV.  He describes this as a “rich, exciting and utterly unstable environment for online content distribution.”

My observation is that there are as many ways to monetize content as there are different end user devices for consumption.  This speaks to RipCode’s mission to enable each of these countless streams over various networks, codecs, players and devices without crippling existing storage or transcoding infrastructure.  While we at RipCode can’t get the world to standardize on one common codec, frame size or bitrate, we can and will generate these requested files on demand via RipCode V4—anything, anywhere, any screen.

As a consumer, I like the variety of choices for where and how I get my video.  As a RipCoder, enabling that experience is what we live for! 

Part 2: IDC Interview - Transcoding Internet and Mobile Video, Solutions for the Long Tail

Published by
Brendon Mills
at October 17, 2007 in On Demand Transcoding, IDC, Mobile Video, Internet Video, Transcoding and RipCode V4. 0 Comments    Email This Post

As a follow up to last week, we’re excited to bring you Part 2 of a 3 Part interview series with IDC analyst, Greg Ireland. Greg co-authored the whitepaper Transcoding Internet and Mobile Video: Solutions for the Long Tail. I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg during his visit to Austin several weeks ago and we talked at length about the direction of the Internet and mobile video markets. In Part 1 of the interview, we discussed market forces driving transcoding, the mobile video impact, and how the Long Tail is being applied to video. In Part 2, we talk about where transcoding fits into the Internet video business model, we look at data around the growth of Internet video, in particular, the rise of short form content and we discuss the drivers pushing additional encodes in an effort to reach the concept of video viewing ubiquity. Look for the final installment of my 3-Part interview with Greg Ireland next week. For more information on this topic, you can download the complete IDC whitepaper from the RipCode website.

Blog Action Day: Eco Friendly Video Transcoding

Published by
Brendon Mills
at October 15, 2007 in Green IT and RipCode V4. 0 Comments    Email This Post

For those who may not know, today, October 15th, is Blog Action Day.  Bloggers around the web are uniting to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger, including me, is posting about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. For RipCode, that’s video transcoding.  I’ve talked in a previous post about how RipCode has introduced a powerful, yet energy efficient single RU appliance which can replace between 10 – 20 general purpose transcode servers.  And at only 165 watts, can translate into significant energy savings, especially for large data centers.
 
Other technologies like blade servers and virtualization are giving data center managers choices for reducing their overall hardware and energy use.  But in the video transcoding space, legacy general purpose servers still dominate the data centers for user generated video sites, studios and syndicators.  Internet and mobile video is growing at a tremendous rate – IDC predicts that by 2011 over 7,800 terabytes of video per day will be downloaded from websites. At RipCode we’re working to transform the way in which most companies think about transcoding and educate the market on a more efficient way to process video content.  But we also understand that not everyone can or will transition to appliance-based transcoding technology…at least not right away.  However there are things that data center managers can do to measure and improve the efficiency of both new and existing data centers.  The GreenGrid, a consortium of information technology companies and professionals seeking to improve energy efficiency in data centers, offers a few good whitepapers for guiding data center managers on these topics. 

In an interesting article by Alex Goldman of ISP-Planet, he quotes Russell Kurtz a principal at CS Technology who gave the keynote address on a conference focused on next generation data center challenges and solutions.  Kurtz said, “Politicians and regulators are starting to notice that data centers consume a significant amount of energy. It’s 1 percent to 2 percent of the U.S. electric load (and growing).  The problems remain that if a data center is built for 10 MW or 20 MW, remember that an electric substation does about 40 MW.  Your data center could use half the local load.”  This underscores what we’ve heard from customers who have space to grow in their data center, but can’t get more power to their building.  Adding more general purpose servers just is not an efficient means to keep up with the amount of video that needs to be transcoded.

This is not an insignificant problem.  So on Blog Action Day, my hope is educate a few more people about the benefits of green transcoding technology like RipCode and reduce the energy footprint required to process the growing volume of online and mobile video.

Why the Name RipCode V4?

Published by
Brendon Mills
at September 28, 2007 in RipCode V4. 0 Comments    Email This Post

Names are certainly important and the team has been so busy leading up to this week’s launch that I ought to take a breather and retrace our steps to explain to those of you asking, “Why RipCode V4?”

The short version: Frankly, because it looks cool.

The longer story: First, we like simple names here at RipCode. Second, we feel that our brand should focus on the company name, RipCode, rather than the individual products. Based on these two simple tenets, we added the “V” for video, not version. And like any good product name poised for growth, we wanted to add a number. V1 or V2 made sense until someone pointed out that they were respectively the first German guided missile used in WWII and first ballistic missile launched into space by Germany. V3 sounded chunky and not impactful.

So, in all, there was no magic science to the name RipCode V4 other than it is simple, easy to pronounce, and it looks cool when it is spelled out. (And yes, car enthusiasts have pointed out to me that the V4 four-cylinder engine is what first comes to their minds.)

One Set of Codecs to Rule Them All? Not Anytime Soon.

Published by
Brendon Mills
at September 26, 2007 in Mobile Video, Microsoft VC-1, DivX, Internet Video, Transcoding, Adobe, H.264, RipCode V4 and SilverLight. 1 Comment    Email This Post

Just when we all started to think that the video industry was beginning to move towards standardization around H.264, Qualcomm announced that it has licensed the DivX codec technology and will support it in a range of video-enabled chipsets for CDMA mobile devices, ahead of Adobe’s Flash Video. As Peter White of Rethink Research writes, “if Qualcomm stays solely with DivX, then it will mean that the worlds of CDMA and WCDMA telephony will have diverged, and that web sites that can provide video to one type of handset will not be able to be played on another.”

In the Flash vs. Silverlight camp, Bradley Werner concludes that with the addition of Silverlight, Microsoft’s VC-1 video codec is rapidly moving into a position of parity with Adobe’s Flash Media Player and both technologies are in good positions to win in the market. Neal Page over at Inlet concurs.

So are these signs that the industry is in a position yet to move toward a set of codec standards? Will it happen soon? To both these counts, the answer is probably not.

In the recent IDC whitepaper Internet and Mobile Video: Transcoding the Long Tail, IDC estimates that there are close to 100 different types of Internet and mobile video files that the market is currently supporting. This is good news for RipCode because the greater the number of video formats and associated increased complexities means more business. However, because it takes a lot of time and development cycles to successfully support the multiple flavors of codecs on the market even we would like to see some degree of consolidation. However, given the slim chance of this happening anytime soon, we’ll continue to take our cues from our customers (video aggregators, user generated content sites, mobile & internet TV providers, etc.) and drive our development to support their codec requirements. After all, it’s the customers who in the end, will likely determine when and under what codecs the market will unify.

IBC Show: RipCode Video File

Published by
Jacqui Galow
at September 24, 2007 in Transcoding and RipCode V4. 0 Comments    Email This Post

We shot some video at the IBC show in Amsterdam and thought we’d share it with you.  Here is just a little bit of the total footage.  Enjoy!