ViewCast Announces High-Density 尼亚加拉9100 Series

ViewCast today announced the availability of its 尼亚加拉9100 系列实时编码器, which are designed to allow multiple analog or digital inputs—in the form of composite or HD-SDI, 分别—for those situations that call for dense clusters of encoders.

The 9100 series is the latest addition to ViewCast's flagship Niagara product line, which was launched almost a decade ago. Some of the Niagara products we've reviewed were underpowered or had odd connector placement, so the company worked hard to get the right mix of power and polish to complement what it sees as a performance benchmark product. From the industry feedback thus far, they seem to have hit the mark.

"We started shipping the high-density, single-rack-unit 尼亚加拉9100 in December, 提前完成计划,迈克·加利说, ViewCast's new vice president of marketing. "We had a number of customers issue purchase orders sight unseen the month before and they were adamant about getting the analog and digital versions of the 9100 as soon as possible."

"The analog input family starts with a products called the 尼亚加拉9100-8A—the A is for analog—that has analog composite inputs,加利说。. "It is powered via CPUs on an advanced motherboard with space for up to four processors. Currently we have two processors, of six cores each, for a total of 12 cores. We're also doing research and development testing with Intel on the eight-core processors."

Galli claims that the input density on the analog inputs is such that the 尼亚加拉9100 8A would be attractive to the surveillance market, as the price point for a fully loaded analog version is between $15,000-20,000的标价. Since showing off a prototype at IBC, the company also has been getting interest from cable operators and Tier 1 telecoms, 加利说.

The second 尼亚加拉9100 unit is the 2D, which is a dual HD-SDI input box that provides density similar to Cisco's Media Processor line. 加利说的是2处理器, 12 core box can generate up to 12 1080p60 outputs (or one per core) at less than 70 percent CPU utilization. The current systems 8A and 2D are capable of 12 D1 or 2 1080i outputs, 分别, and that ViewCast feels they can get to 8-12 1080p outputs per box when Intel expands to 8-core processors.

"Our SimulStream 软件 allows us to have has lower CPU utilization—on the same platform—than a product like Flash Media Live Encoder,加利说。. "We saw about 50 percent better utilization versus FMLE on a Lenovo C2 workstation, using a single processor with four cores, so we feel the advantage is scalable with multiple processors."

When asked about the growth in performance of the general-purpose processor (CPU) versus the graphics processor (GPU) that had figured in to the 过渡的最佳工作流程测试从2010年底开始, 加利说 he sees CPU processor performance growing to the point—at least for live encoding—that there may be an advantage for CPU-based systems when it comes to densities and power consumption.

“我们与处理器无关,加利说。, "so if we saw a reason to do live encoding with a GPU, 我们会考虑的. Clearly the GPU has an advantage when transcoding files, but for our market—live econding—the difference is negligible enough to bring the GPU-CPU differential into question."

比如8A模拟单元, the 2D dual HD-SDI unit price point hasn't been publicly announced but is "far less than $20k list" according to Galli.