Review: ViewCast Niagara 2120 Live Encoding Appliance
With a competitive price of $3,995, the ViewCast's portable, multistream Niagara 2120 should be on the short list of any company or service bureau producing high volumes of on-location live H.264 webcasts.
Video Quality: The Hardware Advantage
Given that Telestream Wirecast costs about $3,500 less than the Niagara, and can produce a similarly configured H.264 stream in real time, I was eager to see how the quality compared. On low-motion sequences, the Niagara clip showed a touch of graininess, but also much more retained detail (Figure 7, below). You can compare the streams yourself at http://www.doceo.com/niagara/Main.html. There is no audio in either clip, and the Telestream file will have to fully download before playing.
Figure 7. Low-motion clips were close, though Niagara showed lots more detail.
On the higher-motion shots, the difference was even more striking. For both quality and detail, the hardware solution was clearly superior, albeit at nearly eight times the price (Figure 8, below).
Figure 8. The quality difference was striking in this high-motion, high-detail frame.
Note that I wasn't singling out Telestream; I tried to encode files using the Adobe Flash Media Encoder, but although the files streamed fine, the files stored to disk wouldn't play or load in any of my analysis software. So Wirecast was the only real-time encoder, software or hardware, that I could get my hands upon. To be fair, between the price differential, and the titling and switching options that Niagara doesn't offer, the trade-off between the two products is less than the quality difference would indicate.
If quality is your number-one consideration, however, the Niagara clearly shines. Overall, the unit was impressive; very good CPU efficiency for single and multiple streams, good ease of use, and very high-quality live video.