By Elina Shatkin, September 9, 2004
Omneon Video Networks announced the introduction of the Omneon Spectrum HD, the latest configuration of the company's scalable media server. The Omneon Spectrum HD provides integrated playback of high-definition video content, and when configured with other components in the Omneon Spectrum family, it allows broadcasters to ingest, store, and play back both SD and HD content simultaneously from a single system, using a common pool of shared storage. The new system is being demonstrated for the first time at IBC2004 in Amsterdam, Sept. 10-14.
Omneon Spectrum HD incorporates two new real-time media interface adapters to provide a complete system configuration for HD material acquisition and playback. Media ingest is based on the new MediaPort 4010, which combines HD MPEG-2 ingest with MPEG Transport Stream (MTS) demux in a single device. The MediaPort 4010 demultiplexes MTS into independent video and audio elementary streams while maintaining frame-accurate synchronization.
HD playout is based on the new MultiPort 4002 playout interface adapter, which features built-in decoding capability for MPEG-2 high definition video, thereby eliminating the need for external HD decoders. The MultiPort 4002 offers playout for two independent channels of MPEG-2 HD video -- each with up to 16 embedded audio channels -- within a single 1-RU device, and multiple MultiPort 4002 devices can be combined to create multi-channel systems as large as required
. Additionally, the MultiPort 4002 can be combined with other Omneon Spectrum I/O devices to create multiformat video server systems to support both SD and HD playout in a broadcast operation.
All Omneon Spectrum components feature plug-and-play operability, which means users can easily add the MediaPort 4010 and MultiPort 4002 to their existing Omneon Spectrum server systems. In addition to the integrated HD capabilities available with the new components, Omneon has recently introduced enhancements to its SDTI media interface adapter, the MediaPort 1002, to enable support for Panasonic's compressed HD format, DVCPRO-HD. With this new capability, the Omneon Spectrum system became the first media server capable of supporting all leading HD formats simultaneously, including HD MPEG, HDCAM, and DVCPRO-HD.
The MultiPort 4002 includes redundant power supplies with failover capability for maximum reliability. For multilingual HD programming requiring multiple audio tracks, the MultiPort 4002 supports 16 channels of audio for each video channel. Each channel on the MediaPort 4010 and MultiPort 4002 provides standard connectors for output of video and audio, as well as a connector for input of RS422 control signals using either VDCP or BVW protocols.
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