Digital Rapids extends capabilities of its encoding solutions

Digital Rapids is now shipping its new Flux HD video capture and preprocessing hardware, plus a new version of the company’s Stream software for encoding and live streaming applications. The new hardware and software expand the capabilities of Digital Rapids’ encoding, transcoding and streaming product families.

New features in version 3.3 include improved encoding, script command insertion, open caption overlay for the Apple iPad and iPhone, as well as Vobile VideoDNA fingerprinting support.

Hardware-based, real-time video preprocessing features make the input signal more compression-friendly. The result is superior visual quality and efficient use of bandwidth in the compressed output, while leaving the host system’s CPU free to encode more simultaneous multiformat outputs. Additional hardware features including video adjustments, advanced scaling, format conversion with cadence detection (including Inverse Telecine), color space conversion and graphic overlay enable high-quality transformation of incoming sources and the addition of branding such as logos.

Available in two models, Flux HD PCIe capture cards are optimized for encoding and streaming via dual-link and 3Gb/s SDI support. The Flux-6510 card includes SD, HD, dual-link HD-SDI and 3G-SDI video input support. The Flux-6550 card offers the same capabilities plus analog inputs including component (HD or SD), S-Video and composite video. SDI embedded audio is supported on both cards, while the Flux-6550 also includes AES and analog audio inputs.

In addition to support for the Flux HD hardware, version 3.3 of the Stream software offers a host of new features and enhancements for Digital Rapids’ StreamZ, StreamZHD and DRC-Stream encoding solutions. Version 3.3 expands the functionality and flexibility of the optional iPhone encoding and segmenting module with enhanced support for the iPad; increased control of encoding and output parameters; support for audio-only streams with associated image files; and parallel output to multiple servers or content delivery networks for redundancy.