Review: ViewCast Osprey-300 and SimulStream

As a Webcasting service provider, I’m always looking for ways to streamline our services, lower our costs, and provide a better service to our clients. Webcasts require a large amount of equipment, which takes up a lot of room and costs a lot to ship. Anything that reduces the amount of equipment offers a potential cost savings. Enter the Osprey-300 and SimulStream technology from ViewCast.

The Osprey-300 is the latest addition to ViewCast’s venerable family of capture cards. The 300 combines the analog functionality of the Osprey-230 with the FireWire inputs of the 500 series cards at an attractive price point. It’s now sold bundled with Adobe Premiere Elements, RealProducer Basic, and Windows Media 9 Series Encoder as the new Osprey EASE package for $499.

The Osprey-300 has two IEEE 1394 ports: one 6-pin connector for 1394 devices, and one 9-pin connector for the new 1394b standard, supporting up to 800Mbps transfer speeds. For analog inputs, there is a breakout cable that offers balanced XLR audio connections, unbalanced RCA audio connectors, an S-Video input, and a BNC composite input (ViewCast were even thoughtful enough to include a BNC to RCA adapter). If you want something even sturdier, ViewCast offers a breakout box and a rackmountable breakout panel that has inputs for two high-end Osprey cards.

ViewCast ships a number of different handy applications with the Osprey-300. First, there’s the audio configuration program, which lets you configure the audio inputs via a graphic interface. You can set the default input level to balanced (+4dBV) or unbalanced (-10dBV), and apply up to 30dB of software boost or attenuation. You can choose a preferred sample rate, and choose how mono signals should be sourced.

A cropping application gives you a graphical interface to the hardware cropping functions, and a logo application lets you place a video "bug" in your video screen. The logo feature, however, begs for a bit more functionality. For instance, you can choose a color for the Osprey to key out of the logo file you specify, but there is no tolerance adjustment, which makes it very difficult to use in practice. Similarly, there is a control that enables you to specify whether the logo should be slightly transparent to blend in better with the video. Unfortunately, you can’t specify how transparent. The only control provided is a checkbox, and I found the result to be a bit too transparent.

The documentation that ViewCast includes with this package is excellent. It includes a discussion about how the Osprey-300 works with various components of the operating system for video capture. This can be particularly helpful for those of you who wish to delve into the netherworlds of the SDK. In particular, the discussion about DirectShow filters and pins is enlightening. Kudos to ViewCast for putting this information into an understandable format.

SimulStream is what really makes the Osprey-300 shine. SimulStream is a software application that enables a single ViewCast capture card to provide audio and video data to multiple applications. Not only that, but SimulStream can provide different video data to different applications. For instance, you can scale the input to 640x480 for a high-bitrate stream, 320x240 for a broadband stream, and 160x120 for a dial-up stream, all using a single ViewCast card.

So how well does it work? To be honest, I was impressed. On a recent Webcast, I decided to try out the Osprey-300 and SimulStream combination on a backup encoder, to see how it would hold up in a production situation. The encoding machines were 2.4GHz Pentium 4 machines, running Windows XP, Service Pack 2. The manual recommends installing the drivers first and then the card, but in my haste to get things running I installed the card, and then let Windows XP find the drivers on the accompanying CD. Nonetheless, everything installed without a hitch.

Next I installed the SimulStream license. This is fairly straightforward, but I do have a quibble—installation requires running a .BAT file on the floppy disk they provide. When you do so, nothing happens for awhile, leaving you with that sinking feeling ("Did I just do something terrible?"). Surely there’s a more elegant way to do this. Eventually a confirmation screen popped up, but for a short time I was distinctly nervous, particularly because I was on site and only hours away from a live broadcast.

Now it was time to fire up some encoders. First, I started a 300Kbps, 320x240 Windows Media stream. For this test I did no scaling and instead let the Windows Media Encoder take care of that. The 300Kbps stream ran at about 21% of CPU. Next, I fired up a dial-up stream at 37Kbps, 176x132. Instead of a doubling of CPU usage, as one might expect, the Windows Task Manager showed an average of about 30% CPU usage. Nice! Finally, I encoded a 764Kbps 320x240 stream, just for kicks. This increased CPU usage significantly, up to an average of about 55%.

I left the streams encoding this way for the duration of the broadcast, which was two hours. The machine coasted along, and I saw no problems whatsoever. Note that I wasn’t archiving these files, so there was no extraneous disk I/O to bog things down. I guess the next experiment will be to try running archives at the same time, and see what that does to CPU usage.

The verdict? Anyone who has read my book should know I’m not a big proponent of putting all your eggs in one basket, especially during a broadcast. But shipping eight encoding boxes around the country is getting old and expensive. The other issue has always been price. It has always been cheaper to build your own encoding boxes and install Osprey-100 cards. But using this type of solution, it’s hard to argue that a single box that can easily output three streams isn’t a good idea.

Apparently I’m a bit late to the game. Shirley Al-Jarani from George Mason University has been using SimulStream for some time, as part of a ViewCast Niagara system. "With the SimulStream option, I have more options for streaming different programs or different bandwidths on the same system," she told me. "In our remote operations, one unit streams Windows Media and Real video/audio (SureStream), as well as audio-only or lower-bitrate streams. Of course, the drawback is that with only one unit, if something goes wrong, we are down. However, so far, I have not had any problems with the Niagara's performance."

Perhaps it is finally time to retire the Osprey-100s. For Webcasting applications, you could opt for the Osprey 230, since the SimulStream capabilities are not available with the IEEE 1394 inputs on the Osprey-300. This makes the cost even lower, and harder to argue with. If you plan on doing some standard video capture with your encoding station, stick with the Osprey-300.

I do have the perfect use for this Osprey-300 (yes, I plan on keeping it): as the card in the connectivity testing box. We recommend testing on-site connectivity well in advance of any Webcast. Using an Osprey-300 and SimulStream (bundled for $849) in one of the new mini form-factor computers will provide a way of testing out the on-site connectivity in a solution that fits in any airplane carry-on rack. Now that’s cool.

(Full disclosure: George Mason University uses LUX Media hosting services for large-scale live events.)