Real Time HDV to WMV/HD Encoding
 

Hi,

Is there any solution available (or on the horizon) that would allow real time encoding of HDV to WMV/HD for live HD streaming applications?

I do that now with DV using an Osprey 500 capture card that decodes DV in hardware and ships it on to Windows Media Encoder on a dual processor Xeon box. Is there any box out there that is even capable of keeping up with HDV bitrates and encoding them to WMV/HD in real time?

I thought that maybe someone form CineForm might be aware of developments in this area since they are working with Microsoft on real time HD editing solutions for WindowsXP.

Thanks,

Jon

To the best of my knowledge this is not possible at the moment
and will probably not be possible for a pretty long time to come.
Most PC's can hardly playback the WM9 HD stuff.

Perhaps they'll make some hardware boards for this?

In the Microsoft booth at NAB there where company(s) showing real-time WMV-HD encoding. I believe these were hardware/DSP accelerated. I didn't get the company name.

Thanks for the responses.

I don't think this will be too long in coming though. It seems to me that Connect HD is doing something analogous to this by being able to convert MPEG2TS on the fly to it's own compressed AVI format (CFHD?). That's all being done in software, no?

Microsoft's NAB press release said that Intel was demonstrating Xeon MP processors capable of supporting real time 720p WMV encoding in software. Digital rapids demonstrated an HD capture card that sounds alot like the HD equivalent of my Osprey 500 DV capture card in that it preprocesses (decodes?) incoming A/V streams before feeding it to the bus. I don't know what the approximate compression factor of MPEG2TS is though and whether PCI or dual channel PCI can handle that. If not than it will have to wait for PCI Express.

On the delivery side, you're right that most legacy desktops can't handle WMV/HD decoding and delivery, but the hardware requirements for 720p delivery aren't that high (P4/2.2Ghz/64MB video card). That describes most any desktop system that has been bought in the last year. I've tested 720p WMV/HD on lots of systems around here of varying ages and have found that most newer systems can handle it.

The other question for streaming is network delivery. Streaming 6Mb/s via unicast would have my network guys coming after me with a gun, but enterprise wide multicasting would be workable.

Jon