Professional Hardware Encoding Systems

Below is a short description of the most popular video Transcoding appliances available in the market today.

Inlet technologies:

Armada: $14,000 + $7,500 additional node.

Windows Media VC-1, Flash 8 (VP6), H.264, MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-2 and AC3 Stereo.
Nice management system. You can define pre encoding tasks such as file verification and metadata extraction and post encoding tasks such as quality control, encryption and even publishing. Multi-CPU system.
No formal reviews are available yet.

http://www.inlethd.com/encoding/65/47/Automated-Transcoding-and-Encoding-Workflow-Management/

Fathom:

H.264, MPEG-4, Windows Media, VC-1, MPEG-2, AVI, and Flash
Watch folders, accepts from tape, servers or editing workstations. Both HD and SD are offered.
http://www.xyhd.tv/2006/11/reviews/review-of-inlets-fathom-vc-1-hardware-accelerator/
http://www.inlethd.com/encoding/18/16/Fathom/

Spinnaker: $9,995

Live encoding and streaming. VC-1, VP6 and H.264.
Price ranges between 30k to 70K.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=10182
http://www.inlethd.com/encoding/20/18/Spinnaker/


Media Excel:

HERA Line of appliances.

The HERA u is designed with web and mobile delivery of user generated content while the HERA f is targeted to Broadcasting.
HERA Series outputs to MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, xVID, QuickTime, Flash 9, WM9, 3GPP. And is configurable to output on Gigabit Ethernet, Fiber Channel and may accept HD-SDI as input.
Metadata extraction and insertion. Scalable and high speed.
No reviews as of the writing of this post. This system is being unveiled at IBC 2008

http://www.mediaexcel.com/hera_4000u.php

HMS File management

The HMS File management system is designed to manage all the Transcoding and delivery of files across many HERA encoding appliances.

http://www.mediaexcel.com/hera_management_system.php

ViewCast:

Niagara Streaming Encoders:

Capture, encode and stream workflows. Depending on the mode it can compress to Mpeg-4 and Flash, wmv and Real. Designed to stream live. Offer SDK.
http://www.viewcast.com/product_GoStreamSURF.asp


Digital Rapids:

Transcode Manager with StreamZ: $20,000 + $5,000 additional node.

Digital Rapids Transcode Manager with StreamZ

A very sophisticated and with unlimited scalability. It offers a full API via XML. It is a very robust system that can be configured to handle specific outputs if needed. You need a server ($20,000) and you can add nodes for $5,000 to $8,000 depending on the output types. They offer a Lite system that can support up to 10 engines. The light version server costs $5,000 and each node is $5,000. The lite API is has some restrictions and limitations.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=9423&page=1
http://www.digital-rapids.com/Products/IndividualProducts/Transcode%20Mgr.aspx
http://www.digital-rapids.com/Products/IndividualProducts/StreamZ.aspx

Ripcode:

Video Transcoding Appliance

Formats: WMV9 / VC-1, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 MP@ML, MPEG-1 Program Stream, H.264 BP and MP, Flash Video (On2 VP6), MPEG-4 Part 2 Simple Profile, 3GPP, AVI, M-JPEG
This is a different take on video Transcoding. The concept is to provide an array of DSP’s that can simultaneously transcode up to 8 different video streams. I saw a demo at streaming media west where the system was simultaneously Transcoding 8 mobile streams.
http://www.ripcode.com/productOverview.php