Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Dynamic Communications

VSW encodes and streams live and on-demand audio and video. It combines the streaming media with applications like Microsoft's PowerPoint to deliver an interactive presentation with live question-and-answer sessions and reader polls.

VSM also lets you register, notify and authenticate participants. I tested these capabilities at Network Computing's Real-World Labs® at Syracuse University using a Hewlett-Packard Co. Kayak workstation with a Pentium III (667-MHz) processor, 384 MB of RAM and all the necessary VSM components, including Virage SmartEncode and a Virage Solution Server (VSS).

X-Files



Virage Interface
click to enlarge

The SmartEncode process takes standard analog (NTSC, PAL, SECAM) or digital video (DV, SDI) and transforms it into a proprietary VDF (Variable Definition File) format for Webcasting through the VideoLogger application. The VideoLogger logs and indexes audio and video, and controls the encoding process for third-party products from the likes of Microsoft and RealNetworks. In an enterprise implementation, the VideoLogger would reside on its own Windows PC (minimum 500-MHz Pentium processor with 512 MB of RAM).

The HP Kayak came equipped with two Osprey 100 video-capture cards--one to capture the video exported from a Panasonic Digital Video Camcorder (PV-DV952) and one to capture a PowerPoint presentation. The VideoLogger, a multithreaded application that generates HTML pages based on queries to the VDF index file, includes a plug-in to receive data from a PowerPoint presentation via a MediaSync application.

  • 1