Handheld Learning - learning with mobile and ubiquitous technologies

Hi, First post so be gentle!!

I work for the video production department within Imperial College and we have been outputting pod and vodcasts for sometime now, but need to speed up our mpeg4 encoding. We are currently using EGATO TURBO 264 on a mac but would ideally like to start real time encoding. Has anyone come across any 'good' real time encoders (we have found a few bad ones).

Martin

Hi Martin

Welcome to the forum!

Hmmm... real time mpeg 4 encoding. The Elgato hardware that you have, although not RT, is a good piece of kit which I also use on my Mac and is certainly quicker than Visual Hub or ffmpeg.

You'll probably need to (or already have) google around for a board most of which seem to be aimed at Windows PC systems.

Like you say, there's some rubbish out there.

You could try poking around at http://www.mpeg4.net which is a good resource of both commercial and community advice.

Let us know how you get on.

Cheers

Graham

Personally I use VisualHub. Depending on source material I have found it faster than real time.

However problem with VisualHub, online convertors, etc is that they are only really useful for small number or individual video conversion.

Once you get a whole college (or university) producing video and audio broadcasts, these consumer and web based tools generally won't scale.

You may want to consider looking at Mac Server OS X, which as part of Podcast Producer uses Xgrid to spread the processing to a farm of servers and this speeds up encoding to much better than real time.

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/podcasts.html

Podcast Producer uses Xgrid distributed processing technology for large-scale podcast productions — encoding tasks are automatically distributed to other servers.

Obviously you are going to need an Xserve (possibly more) to do this and they ain't cheap!

You don't need a Mac at the client end, a Windows user can simply upload a video recording from their computer.