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The ability to deliver multiple services to a variety of devices – including television sets, PCs and mobile devices – is becoming a necessity in order to provide viewers with a richer experience. At the same time, the architecture must be cost-eff ective, reliable and highly efficient.
Designed to address the increasing demand for advanced video and audio services Harmonic’s ProStream™ 1000 stream processing platform with Mentor™ re-encoding technology is a highly dense MPEG-2 re-encoding solution, with 16 standard definition variable bit-rate (VBR) decoders and 16 standard defi nition constant bit-rate (CBR) encoders. The ProStream 1000 is ideal for cable operators who want to increase revenue per program and customer satisfaction by flexibly delivering multiple switched broadcast services through their existing video-on-demand (VOD) infrastructure.
A new challenge posed in switched digital broadcast architectures is manipulation and processing of pre-compressed video from a variety of sources into CBR streams appropriate for the VOD content delivery model. Harmonic’s ProStream 1000 with Mentor enables VBR-to-CBR or CBR-to-CBR bit-rate adjustments as well as format changes to pre-encoded MPEG-2 video streams, while maintaining superior video quality.
Based on technology utilized in Harmonic’s award-winning DiviCom® encoder line, Harmonic’s Mentor technology leverages the knowledge and experience gained from several generations of market-leading encoders.
Currently available rate-shaping technology delivers a limited range of bit-rate control by manipulating MPEG quantization parameters and restricts operators’ flexibility to create switched digital broadcast services without affecting video quality.
The ProStream 1000 takes this technology a step further by decoding and re-encoding the MPEG-2 video stream, allowing both the group of pictures (GOP) structure and horizontal resolution to be modified. This additional control eliminates dependency on the incoming video bit-rate and maintains video quality while enabling a greater range of bit-rate adjustments than currently possible.
With its standard IP (Gigabit Ethernet) and DVB- ASI input and output interfaces, the ProStream 1000 can be easily incorporated in any existing headend environment or digital turnaround (DTA) architecture. The ProStream 1000’s robust, extensible and highly scalable design supports MPEG re-multiplexing functionality, including PID remapping and fi ltering, as well multiple IP sockets containing MPTS and SPTS. The system’s flexible 1-RU configuration not only reduces rack space and power requirements, but also simplifies network infrastructure while delivering a high-availability solution.
Highlights
- Compact, modular 1-RU system with 5 I/O slots
- Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) I/O module, 2 GbE ports per card
- ASI I/O module, 4 ASI ports per card
- Mentor™ MPEG-2 processing cards for decoding and encoding of video streams
- High-Quality MPEG-2 MP@ML CBR video compression
- Supports nPVR and switched digital broadcast (capable of regenerating GOP)
- Selectable horizontal video resolutions
- MPEG-2 TS or RTP/UDP over IP output
- Maintains all VBI and Data PIDs information from input to output
- Multiplexing core allows remultiplexing of any service from any input to any output
- Controlled via NMX Digital Service Manager™ or HTTP as a stand-alone device
- Switched digital broadcast
- Network PVR (nPVR)
- Digital turnaround (DTA)
For information about other ProStream 1000 applications, click on one of the following links:
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