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If you're producing a live streaming event, you have three choices when it comes to encoding: You can hire out the work, buy a streaming appliance, or build your own streaming encoder. If you choose the third approach and want to stream HD H. 264 video via Flash, Kulabyte' s XStream Live 2. 1 Flash video encoder needs to be on your short list. While the interface is still (to put it kindly) a work in progress, the encoder proved very efficient and reliable and produced excellent video quality.
Let's start with some speeds and feeds. The software costs $6,495 per server with no CPU core limitation. It can use FireWire input for SD streams and is compatible with input cards from both AJA and Blackmagic Design for HD. I used Blackmagic DeckLink HD Extreme for my tests.
As an overview, Kulabyte' s software includes a feature called the Preset Maker and the XStream Live encoder, which can produce up to four simultaneous streams if your computer is sufficiently powerful. Operationally, you create your preset first, load it into the encoder during event setup, and then press the magic Start button to start producing the stream. When you create the preset, you designate the target server, stream names, and other details; you can choose to save an archive file during the event.
Creating Your Presets
Kulabyte's Preset Maker (Figure 1) is a very spare application that deals more with stream and connection issues than preprocessing and encoding parameters, though this likely will change in future versions. You can create a preset with up to four outputs of varying parameters with the multiple files available as source files for dynamic streaming in a live event scenario. With each output, you can designate both a primary and a backup stream - a nice bit of redundancy that lets you seamlessly switch to the backup...