Broadcast Engineering, May 5, 2011:  VidOvation (www.vidovation.com) debuts the Communitek Minicaster™, a portable, self-contained, stand-alone system for live HD and SD video streaming and webcasting.  Please click here for the full story.

All of the necessary hardware and software resources are included for creating high-quality streams from all types of professional video sources. Featuring MPEG-4/H.264, Adobe Flash and Windows Media encoding, the Minicaster can produce streams at bit rates from 100kb/s to 15Mb/s for all types of streaming applications.

The compact unit offers video and audio capture/compression, stream formatting/output and archiving.

Capture/compression transforms a wide variety of input signals into one of several different compressed signal formats, which are compatible with player software commonly found on user PCs and other devices. Inputs can come from video cameras, tape decks, servers, production switchers and PCs.

Stream formatting/output wraps the compressed video and audio signals inside IP packets that can be transmitted over public and private networks. Care is taken to ensure that each stream is well-behaved to avoid bit rate peaks and valleys, and to ensure compatibility with a wide selection of PC player software.

Multicast output is enabled for operation on private networks. Minicaster output streams can also be configured to work with many different reflecting servers and content distribution networks to allow live, simultaneous stream viewing by any number of viewers.

Archiving records a copy of the compressed video and audio signals on the Minicaster’s built-in hard drives while the stream is being generated. The resulting files can be uploaded to a Web server for later playback in VOD mode.