Telairity Product Solutions: An Easy Choice

Direct broadcast satellite operators, major TV networks, TV stations, cable companies, Telcos and post production facilities all have an easy choice to make for their real time encoding needs. Telairity's high quality BE8000 and BE7000 series real-time HD and SD AVC encoders are a fully software upgradeable solutions, preserving the broadcasters investment for the future. The AVClairity family of real time, high definition, H.264 video encoding software provides high quality video images while at the same time optimizing bit rates so broadcasters can maximize their channel capacity and programming. Telairity provides its customers with complete rack-mountable video compression products using the breakthrough Telairity-1 processors and AVClairity flexible and scalable compression software. An investment in the Telairity platform helps customers preserve their platform investment while they continue to upgrade video quality and add feature enhancements to their video equipment.

Enabling True HD ENG/SNG (Backhaul) Operations with Telairity H.264/AVC Encoders

Live field reporting imposes strong requirements on vendor equipment. First, equipment must be compatible with existing infrastructure. In many cases, this means transmission bandwidths that may be as low as 6Mbps. Second and equally important, latencies must be kept very low, so that total end-to-end delay stays under a half-second. Third, equipment must be exceptionally reliable. Fourth, when problems do occur, recovery must be possible in a few seconds. And last but certainly not least from the standpoint of a field crew, equipment must be virtually fool-proof, extremely simple to operate even under the most trying or hectic conditions.

Although HD formats are quickly spreading into studio-based news reporting, the combination of the above five requirements for live field reporting have effectively precluded taking HD cameras out of the studio and into the field for remote operations. Older MPEG-2 compression technology is simply unable to fit HD format video in links of 10Mbps and below. Although advanced MPEG-4 (H.264/AVC) compression technology can solve this bandwidth problem, it also imposes much stronger processing requirements, sufficient to drive encode latency up to several seconds with current implementations. Also, advanced encoders are frequently complicated to operate, lack key reliability features, and may take minutes to reboot if they have to recover from a serious problem.

However, new technology from Telairity now provides a solution that uniquely addresses all five of the above requirements, opening the way for stations to finally take HD out of the studio and into the field. The Telairity 1RU BE8100 HD and BE7100 SD encoders, based on Telairity's exceptionally powerful 50 billion operations per second (50 Gigaops) T1P2000 DSP chip and Telairity's coordinated AVClairity encoding software, offer all the following features:

• The latest H.264/AVC (MPEG-4) encoding technology, able to deliver a quality HD picture in 6Mbps or less (the same sort of bandwidth required by MPEG-2 for SD today), and a quality SD picture in 1Mbps or less.
  • The fact that all Telairity encoders are software upgradeable ensures that Telairity equipment remains state-of-the art in its compression abilities for years to come.
  • Since all Telairity encoders implement standard H.264/AVC encoding technology, they are compatible with any standard H.264 decoder. With Telairity equipment, there is never any lock-in to a proprietary solution.
• Telairity's HD encode latency of 150ms is by far the lowest in the industry today. Not only can a Telairity H.264 encoder deliver an HD frame in about the same bandwidth as an MPEG-2 SD frame, in many cases, it will actually deliver the frame in less time.
• The fact that Telairity's AVClarity encoding software is designed to run directly on Telairity's T1P200 DSP (without any intermediate operating system) means that power-on and reboot times are virtually instant-a matter of a second or two. As a result, if a problem does occur requiring the encoder to restart, it's possible to get back on the air almost at once, with no more than a momentary interruption of service.
• The BE8100 and BE7100 systems offer a front-panel with Telairity's “two-button” control. Using Telairity's easy-to-operate graphical user interface, Telairity encoders can be readily programmed to switch from any configuration of encoding parameters to any other configuration of encoding parameters with a press of an up/down arrow key, followed by a press of the enter key.
• Both the BE8100 and BE7100 1RU systems come standard with dual redundant power supplies. The fact that these systems generate relatively little heat (a leading cause of electronic component failure), as well as the fact that they entirely avoid the overhead and complications imposed by operating system software, also contribute to their extraordinary reliability and durability.