MONTREAL—Purdue University has an online masters in engineering program that allows for working professionals to complete their studies. Part of its offering is the capture and delivery of its on-campus classroom lectures via video on demand or as a live stream. To do this, the school has recruited the Matrox Monarch HD H.264 hardware encoder.
Each engineering classroom is equipped with two PTZ cameras that feed audio and video signals via SDI to a video switcher located in an operator room. A production engineer from the operator room produces the audio and six video sources to be sent for lecture capture. The resulting output from the switcher serves as the input for the Monarch HD encoder.
The Monarch HD sends a 1280x720, full frame rate, RTMP stream to a Wowza Media Server while simultaneously recording at a 1920x1080 resolution to a network mapped drive. Since the encoder can record MP4 or MOV files to a locally attached SD card or USB drive, or to a network mapped drive, the recording bit rate can be set up to 28 Mbps. Not requiring transcoding, the files can be transferred immediately to the appropriate watch folde/server.
With the support of the Monarch HD’s application programming interface, Purdue was able to develop an automation scheduler application to control the operations for scheduled events. For ad-hoc recordings, a third-party controller starts and stops the operations by making API calls to the Monarch HD encoders.
