Video Multicasting with Appliance Ease
Can simultaneously multicasting six channels of live video possibly be as easy as using a toaster? Although the Optibase MGW 2000 Streaming Server Appliance is slightly more demanding than a toaster, or even a blender, it makes capturing, encoding and streaming video so easy that even a non-technical manager could do it. While the user-friendly nature of the appliance is enticing enough, enabling the easy introduction of reliable streaming to a corporate intranet or extranet, the multicast component of the Optibase MGW 2000 provides some dramatic benefits.
Multicasting technology enables a one-to-many relationship from server to client. For example, sending 100 clients a 1Mbps stream via multicast only requires 1Mbps of bandwidth. Accomplishing the same task via unicasting — requiring each client to access a separate stream — would take 100Mbps of bandwidth. Except for some experimental proof-of-concept activities, multicasting can't be run on the public Internet. On a private LAN, WAN, and/or VPN, however, multicasting is deployable today.
Key Specs
Our review unit consisted of an Optibase MGW 2000 box with two MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding modules — custom hardware modules that can be plugged into one of the six slots on the back of the rack-mountable MGW 2000 server. The only module currently available is an MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 module that accepts data from analog video (composite or SVIDEO) and unbalanced audio sources.
Optibase (www.optibase.com) plans to release additional modules in the second half of this year, including WMT MPEG-4 and ISO MPEG-4 versions, an upgraded MPEG-2 module with SDI input, and an MPEG-1-only module. The Optibase unit itself is list priced at $15,995, including one MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding module. Additional MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding modules are available at $8,995 each, list price.
In addition to feeding live streams, the MGW 2000 supports an external SCSI drive (not included) for serving streams from disk on-demand. To play MPEG-2 streams, you'll need one of Optibase's VideoPlex decoding boards. Note that Windows 2000 drivers are not yet available for these products, so streaming MPEG-2 from the MGW 2000 is a 98/ME/NT solution until that release, which is expected soon. For MPEG-1 decoding, Optibase's Commotion Receiver software is needed on client machines to catch streams and feed them to WMP for decoding.
Intuitive Setup
Initial setup consisted of first establishing a system console (ASCII terminal/PC with Hyperterminal) via an Optibase-provided serial cable; telneting into Windows NT Embedded 4.0; running a configuration program; choosing appropriate network settings (DHCP in my case); and rebooting.
There is only one configuration program required, with just a few menu items. Also, the documentation is good, providing just enough information to accurately address each question without rambling. I executed configuration changes in this simple ASCII menu several times without problems.
All testing utilized Optibase's MPEG-1 software decoder, Commotion Receiver. The decoder software was installed on a dozen machines, some Windows 98, some Windows 2000, without trouble and it performed reliably.
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