A Healthy Convergence of Conferencing and Streaming Media

No Special Code or Training Required
Truestar Health’s live broadcasts are really a set of conference calls from various cameras in their fitness and cooking studios to the STARBAK VCG.

To start a webcast is a simple mouse move. The producer’s drag-and-drop control console is in fact a Truestar-personalized version of the VCON MXM management GUI. Behind the scenes, the streaming media encoding engine, Truestar’s STARBAK VCG, behaves like an H.323 videoconferencing endpoint or gateway. It responds directly to calls from the VCON HD-100 codecs or initiates calls to the HD-100 in individual studios, in response to commands issued by the MXM gatekeeper.

The VCG receives the media streams in their native format: the video in H.263 and audio in G.722. Media is "unwrapped" from the H.323 signaling and new formatting applied according to pre-established Truestar templates. From the VCG, content can be broadcast live in Windows MediaPlayer, the Real One Player and/or Apple QuickTime formats suitable for broadband networks. The live content can also be recorded locally to disk in high quality, at data rates upwards of 1Mbps.

Once archived, the scripts in Truestar’s servers can publish the content automatically. From the VCG the files are moved onto Truestar Web servers and streamed out over the Web, upon schedule or on request, to members’ PCs.