Review: Sunnyside Software RayCaster 1.6

I like RayCaster, but then I’m a sucker for a pretty face. It’s well thought-out and has some nice features. For example, if the DV input ever fails, RayCaster immediately puts up a broadcast color bars slide. This is a great feature and shows me that these are people who understand webcasting.

However, I have one major concern and a number of suggestions for Sunnyside Software. The concern is the heavy CPU load, due to the fact that RayCaster must decode the incoming digital video stream before it can encode it, and this is a CPU hit. I tested RayCaster on an Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz machine with a gigabyte of RAM and a Radeon 7500. Granted, this is the minimum machine that Sunnyside Software recommends, but I was unable to encode two streams concurrently (300Kbps and 37Kbps Windows Media 9) without my CPU load running dangerously high. If I opened up the preview window, for example, my load would go through the roof. And the color-coding of the CPU load readout isn’t aggressive enough, in my opinion. I don’t like to run my encoders much over 60% CPU load, but the CPU load readout doesn’t turn yellow until somewhere around 75%, and doesn’t turn red until somewhere over 90%.

There are also a number of things that make it feel like a 1.0 product, none of which are show-stoppers, but all need to be worked on. For example, to open up a script play list, you choose Open from the file list, which triggers a window that warns, "Changes to this document will be lost. Save them first?" First of all, it’s a webcast, not a document; second, opening up a script play list doesn’t affect the webcast settings. Scripts can be rearranged in the Script Wizard by dragging and dropping them, but the target area you have to use to grab them is virtually impossible to find!

I have a few other suggestions:
• Give me a button to open up the preview window, which should default to the Active source, not the DV input—it’s most important to monitor what your encoder is seeing, not what your DV input is seeing.
• A mute button in the preview section would be handy.
• The audio-level adjustment in the source module should be vertical, not horizontal, and the input meters should be color-coded.
• Finally, it would be nice to be able to label the streams in the encoding module. Right now they default to WM #1, WM #2, etc. It would be better if they defaulted to the profile name, or to something the user could specify, such as "Broadband MBR." In the settings window, let me add or delete audio and video streams in the MBR profiles.

It may seem like I’m being a bit hard on RayCaster, but that’s only because I like it and it shows promise. All the shortcomings I’ve mentioned are either cosmetic or minor. In discussions with Sunnyside Software, I found them to be responsive and eager to improve RayCaster. It’s already a cool product, and I have no doubt that it’s going to keep getting better.