Attend Free Video Streaming and Compression Tools Training in Chicago

Posted by Derrick on March 12, 2010 under Video Streaming and Compression | Be the First to Comment

Attend a Free Video Streaming and Compression Tools Training in Chicago, Illinois next week. The training will take place on March 19th, 2010 at the Courtyard Chicago Downtown/River North. If you’re in or near Chicago and need to get familiar with video streaming and compression, then make sure you attend the Free Episode Encoder, Wirecast and Sawmill Professional Training. The training will get you up to speed with video encoding using Telestream’s Episode Encoder and webcasting with Telestream’s Wirecast. Attendees will learn how to encode videos for downloadable streaming and real-time streaming and also learn about 1-pass and 2-pass encoding as well as many other technical items related to video compression. The training day also includes Instructor and Video Streaming and Compression Consultant, Derrick Freeman, teaching attendees how to perform log file analysis using Sawmill Professional. You can Click Here to Register for the Event in Chicago.

Webcasting from the iPhone Included in Video Streaming and Compression Training

Posted by Derrick on March 7, 2010 under Video Streaming and Compression | Be the First to Comment

Webcasting from the iPhone is included in our Video Streaming and Compression Training.  The iPhone is now one of the killer apps and has many capibilities and one of them includes Webcasting from it.  Attend one of our 2-Day Video Streaming and Compression Trainings and learn how to do it.  Learn how to include you iPhone Live Webcast in a Blog Page or in a Web Page.  The 2-Day Training is available in Orlando, On-line and On-site.  View Upcoming Training Schedule

Here are some other items included in the training:

• How to encode Downloadable streaming videos
• How to encode Real-time streaming videos
• Best Practices for Compression and Streaming
• How to encode to QuickTime, Windows Media, H.264, Real Media and Flash video formats
• What the best CODECS are for their streaming formats
• How to author QuickTime, Windows Media, H.264 and Flash downloadable streaming videos
• How to author Flash .FLV files using Dreamweaver .SWF players
• How to author Flash .FLV files using JW Player
• Benefits of 1-Pass CBR, 1-Pass VBR, 2-pass CBR and 2-Pass VBR compression
• Knowledge of Deinterlacing, Key Frame Every, Frames Per Second, Cropping and other items
• How to set up Live Streaming
• How to analyze log files using Sawmill Professional

Featured Software for the class:

• Sorenson Squeeze 6
• Episode Encoder Pro
• Wirecast
• Dreamweaver
• Sawmill Professional

Call Freeman Compression Inc. at 407.477.5837 or contact us by E-mail at info@freemancompression.com to register for a class.

NOS Bringing Vancouver Olympic Games to The Netherlands with StreamZ Encoders

Posted by Derrick on February 8, 2010 under Video Streaming and Compression | Be the First to Comment

Digital Rapids — the leading provider of tools and solutions for bringing television, film and web content to wider audiences — and Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS) announced that the Dutch public broadcaster has selected Digital Rapids’ StreamZ encoding systems to power live and on-demand Internet and mobile coverage of the 2010 Olympic Games for audiences in the Netherlands. The 2010 Olympic Games will be held February 12-28 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Part of Netherlands public broadcasting system Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (NPO), NOS is a market leader in the field of news and sports coverage on television, radio, the Internet and mobile devices. NOS will supplement their television coverage of the Vancouver Olympic Games with up to eight simultaneous live streams on the Web and extensive mobile content. The StreamZ systems will encode source video feeds into Web-friendly streams for viewing through an interactive experience powered by Microsoft(r) Silverlight(r) technology, and into multiple formats for mobile viewing. The encoded live streams will also be archived for viewers to watch on-demand.

“Our goal at NOS is to help strengthen the position of Dutch sports, by enabling the public to follow the many sports that play an important role in our society across all possible digital media platforms,” said Roeland Stekelenburg, Head of New Media at NOS. “During the 2008 Olympic Games, the ratio of streams viewed on our Website relative to the size of our country’s population was one of the highest in the world. Digital Rapids StreamZ encoders allow us to provide the quality and reliability we need for coverage of an event of this significance.”

“We’re thrilled that NOS has again chosen our award-winning encoding systems for their online Olympic Games coverage,” said Brick Eksten, President of Digital Rapids. “Audience expectations for the breadth, depth and quality of online sports coverage are higher than ever, and StreamZ encoding solutions are ideal for enabling superior Web-based experiences surpassing these expectations.”

StreamZ is the industry’s most versatile encoding solution, delivering multi-format video capture, encoding, transcoding and live streaming in a powerful turnkey configuration that integrates easily into any professional media environment. Combining the quality and performance advantages of hardware-based preprocessing with a format-flexible and feature-rich software application, StreamZ seamlessly supports live and on-demand multi-platform distribution opportunities with real-time, simultaneous encoding to multiple output formats.

Encoding Flash Linked Downloadable Streaming Videos with Squeeze 6

Posted by Derrick on February 5, 2010 under Video Streaming and Compression | 2 Comments to Read

Encoding Flash Linked Downloadable Streaming videos with Sorenson Media’s Sorenson Squeeze 6 is enhanced.  This tutorial will help you if you’ve upgraded to Sorenson Squeeze 6 or purchased the new version and new Squeeze 6 license.  This workflow in this tutorial is helpful if you need to encode Flash Linked .SWF and .FLV using the Sorenson Media player skins for Download Streaming.    We’ll show you how to create a Flash Linked Downloadable Streaming video that is geared for high broadband users.   The video that we’re encoding is a 720 x 480 DV progressive source with PCM audio and black edges.

Now, let’s get started.

Navigate to the Formats tab located in the Presets section.  Twirl down the Adobe Flash Movie (.swf) templates and navigate to the F8 SWF 360p (4×3) compression preset.  Now copy the preset to create a version you can customize.  Select the preset and Right-click your mouse and select Copy Audience Preset from the Contextual Menu.  You can also select the Creates a Copy button below the presets.  Locate your new preset which should have copy at the end of the Preset name.  Double-click the preset to open it for editing.

Once your preset opens you can adjust your settings but first you need to name your new preset.  For this tutorial name your preset F8_flashlinked_DL_360.  Remember it’s best to make sure you don’t have any spaces in your preset names as they are included in the name of your output file.  Removing spaces mainly helps in the web authoring process.

OK.  Now move to the Codec settings within the Video Tab. You’ll adjust our preset for Downloadable Streaming video for high broadband users.  Keep in mind this is general preset.  You might have to do some additional tweaking to get your desired quality for output.  In your preset the On2 VP6 Pro Codec should be selected along with 2-Pass VBR.  Since the video frame rate is 29.97 frames per second adjust your output frame rate to 15 fps.  By doing this you’re cutting the frame rate in half which will give you smooth motion.  For your target Data Rate adjust it to 600Kbps.  You can keep VP6-E for the Profile with Auto Key Frames Enabled with an Auto Key Frame Threshold of 70.

For Frame Size select 480 x 360.  You can select Maintain Aspect Ratio with Key Frames set to Key Frame Every 90 frames.  So in this case the codec will ad a new key frame at least every 6 seconds since 15 fps is our output frame rate.

Moving onto the Audio settings within the Audio tab.  The Fraunhofer MP3 Codec should be selected.  Adjust your datarate to 40Kbps, Sample Rate set to 22050,  Channels to Stereo and 16 bit for your Sample Size.

Next move to the Player Options Tab.  At this point you’re going to determine the Player/Skin that you want to surround your video for playback on the web.  For this tutorial select the Aluminum Player.

For the Video location you can leave the default value of http:// for the URL/Path and make sure Play Automatically is selected.

A new feature in Squeeze 6 is you can actually attach Filter presets within your compression presets.  However, in this tutorial you want to create a filter that we can apply to other videos as well.  Moving on, navigate to the Filters section on the left hand side within Squeeze 6.

Move down to the Web Generic Filter and select it then click the Creates a Copy button.  Now double-click the Web Generic copy Filter you just created.  When the Filter preset opens change your filter name to SD_Cropping_NoDeinterlace.  You’re giving your Filter this name because you’re making a Filter preset for encoding Progressive SD sources that have blacking edges.

In the Filter preset settings you can check on uncheck items you don’t want to include.  For this Filter uncheck Deinterlace since the source is progressive.  Now check Crop, Brightness, Contrast and Audio Volume.  For Brightness adjust to your setting to 10.  For contrast adjust your setting to 15,  and for Audio Choose Normalize and adjust to 90.  Keep in mind if your source file is really bright you might need to deselect the Contrast and Brightness values.

For cropping off our black edges you’ll multiply the aspect ratio of 4:3 times 8 in which you’ll crop 32 pixels off the left and right and 24 pixels off the top and bottom.  So for the Top input 12 pixels, for Bottom input 12 pixels, for the Left 16 pixels and for the Right input 16 pixels.  Click OK once you’ve made all of your adjustments.

Now onto compressing your video.  Drag your source file into the Batch Tree.  You can also choose Import File from the Input Options and navigate to your desired video and click Open.

Next Select your F8_flashlinked_DL_360 Compression preset and drag it onto your video.  In my case, I’ll drag the F8_flashlinked_DL_360 preset on top of my video called Car02 in the Batch Tree.   Then drag your Filter preset over top of your Compression Preset in the Batch Tree.  Looking at the image above you would drag your Filter preset over top of F8_flashlinked_DL_360 located under Source Settings.  You’ll know your filter is applied when you see Filter : SD_Cropping_NoDeinterlace display within your applied Compression preset.

To select a custom output for you file you can adjust this within the Squeeze Preferences.  Click the Edit Pull-down menu and choose Preferences.

When the dialog opens click the Output Tab and the Browse button to create an output location for all of your encodes.  If you don’t select a custom output for your video Squeeze will put your output videos in the same location as your source.  Click OK on the Preferences tab once you’re done.

Now you’re all set to encode your video.  Click the Squeeze It! button.

Once your video is finished encoding you will have 3 files in your output location.  All files will have the same name except for the file extension.  One file is the .SWF file, another if the Flash .FLV file and the final file is an .HTML file.  You will need these files when you author your video for your Web Page. For details on the authoring process for Flash Linked .SWF and .FLV files view the tutorial Authoring a Web Page for Flash Linked Downloadable Streaming with Dreamweaver CS4. Other tutorials are available on our blog as well.

Wowza Empowers Live Dutch Webcast for Haiti Earthquake Relief

Posted by Derrick on February 2, 2010 under Video Streaming and Compression | Be the First to Comment

A one-day national fundraising effort championed by a collection of Dutch radio and TV stations helped to raise a startling €83,448,252 for earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. Supporting the effort, U.S.-based Wowza Media Systems, donated its media servers and the Dutch IS Internet Services in cooperation with Radio538 hosted the live webcast streams that reached more than one million online listeners.

Recognized for creating the first unified media server capable of simultaneously streaming to all major desktop, mobile device and IPTV player clients, Wowza Media Systems has been particularly embraced by radio and TV broadcasters worldwide looking to expand their audiences through the online channel.

The participating radio stations, including popular commercial stations Radio538, Q Music, SLAM FM, Radio Veronica, as well as public networks 3FM and Radio 2, broadcasted the fundraiser  Thursday, January 21 as Radio 555. The giro number 555 is used in the Netherlands for donations to charities such as Oxfam, Unicef, the Red Cross and others which fall under the Dutch national aid organization cooperative, Samenwerkende Hulporganisaties (SHO).

“We’ve been using Wowza Media Servers to stream our programming content online for some time now and we knew the technology was more than up to the task of supporting this kind of effort,” said Alexander Josiassen, Technology and Operations Manager of Radio538. “Without hesitation, Wowza donated the additional software to power the massive webcast and wildly surpassed our technical expectations by enabling streaming to 145,000 simultaneous online listeners and reaching more than one million people in total for the day.”

This realization is driving strong demand for Wowza Media Server 2 from a broad range of customers. Mirror Image Internet, a global CDN that has already upgraded to Wowza Media Server 2, was able to add iPhone streaming capability to its portfolio of services at virtually zero incremental cost. Other companies including Livestream, one of the largest live streaming platforms, is now offering customers simultaneous Flash and iPhone reach without having to make any investment or impose changes to how they encode content.

The broadcast fundraiser for Haiti mirrors efforts by the Dutch broadcasters who conducted a similar national relief effort for victims of the 2004 tsunami in Asia.

“The incredibly quick and effective response by these broadcasters, and the tremendous outpouring of support from the Dutch people themselves provides great deal of hope that we’ll be able to make a difference in the lives of those who have been affected by this tragedy,” said Dave Stubenvoll, CEO and Co-founder of Wowza Media Systems. “We are humbled and proud to have been able to play a role in this humanitarian effort.”