Full-Featured Video Solutions

For this month's review of videoconferencing and multimedia solutions for the Windows NT platform, I examine an eclectic mix of products. Even though each of the three products I tested offers full-motion video and audio streams, GEO Interactive's Emblaze VideoPro 2.0, PictureTel's Live200, and White Pine Software's MeetingPoint 3.5 couldn't be more different from one another.

Emblaze VideoPro is a challenger to both Progressive Networks' and Microsoft's Web-based streaming video solutions. Although Emblaze VideoPro doesn't have the functionality of its more popular competitors, the product is nevertheless the quickest, easiest way to incorporate video streams into a Web site. Browsers don't need to download a proprietary video player to view an Emblaze VideoPro stream; a small Java applet, which is part of the video stream users receive when they select an Emblaze VideoPro video, serves as the video player. The main difference between VideoPro and Progressive Networks' and Microsoft's solutions is that VideoPro requires a server.

Live200 is an all-in-one ISDN-based videoconferencing solution. Live200 uses a complex combination card that incorporates an ISDN adapter, sound card, and video capture board on one PCI card. The Live200 product includes a pair of external speakers, a microphone, and a camera. If you have ISDN on your terminal systems, you need to take a look at Live200 when considering videoconferencing implementations for your network.

MeetingPoint is a powerful multiparty conference server. The product is fully configurable, scalable, designed for large network deployments, and, unlike most of the other currently available videoconferencing solutions, supports low-bandwidth dial-up connections in addition to higher-bandwidth alternatives.

Emblaze VideoPro 2.0
Emblaze VideoPro compresses .avi video files into a streaming format for LAN and WAN distribution. The product can create streaming video and audio content for viewing across the Internet or an intranet without requiring the client to have a plugin or separate utility. The software sends the viewer a small Java applet with the streaming content.

Although housing both a Microsoft Media Player and a Progressive Networks RealPlayer video stream to support most browsers is a popular practice these days, one Emblaze VideoPro video stream on a Web server satisfies viewers on all OSs. An Emblaze VideoPro stream takes up roughly half as much disk space as the Microsoft and Progressive Networks solutions do, because you store only one video stream on the server instead of two, and any Java-compatible browser running on any OS can view the content.

Installing the Emblaze VideoPro software on my test system didn't take much effort. The software installs in seconds, and you don't need to reboot your system to use it. GEO Interactive recommends that you disable any antivirus programs on your system before you install the product (you can restart your antivirus program after you've installed the Emblaze VideoPro software). In addition, you must install Emblaze VideoPro in a folder devoted to the software; the product won't function properly if you install it to a root directory.

Emblaze VideoPro's main GUI is straightforward, mostly because only four icons constitute the main toolbar. The software takes video content in an .avi format and converts it to scalable, compressed Emblaze formats for streaming across the Web. The software includes 12 preset compression algorithms tailored for 28.8Kbps dial-up, 56Kbps, ISDN, and T1 connections. You can select large and small display windows; smooth, smoother, and smoothest playback; and an option to record video with no audio.

To convert an .avi file to an Emblaze video stream, select your target .avi file and click the Import icon on the main toolbar. Highlighting a file in the Movie Selection dialog box displays a thumbnail image of the file, displays the file's size in megabytes and duration in minutes, and displays the video frame in pixels and frames per second, as Screen 1, page 165, shows.

When you specify a compression algorithm and click Estimate, Emblaze VideoPro calculates the compression ratio and the Output Movie size in kilobytes. To customize compression further, click the Advanced icon on the main toolbar. A new interface lets you select from 12 preset compression algorithms and adjust the target data rate down to a hundredth of a kilobit. You can adjust frame rate from the standard 15.26 frames per second, which provides the smoothest, most stable motion, to 0.95 frames per second, which provides the sharpest picture.

The Emblaze VideoPro software lets you create an HTML tag and enable a control panel for your video stream. You can give the control panel play, pause, and rewind functions, and you can add an adjustable slider bar. You have other customization options to choose from, including adjusting the size of the display window, specifying that the video appear in a new window rather than as part of a Web page, muting the audio track, and automatically starting the stream. You can also tweak the size of the stream buffer before the stream plays on a client system. After you set the parameters you want, go to the main screen and click the Compress icon on the main toolbar. In the small window that pops up, you can track the progress of the compression.

Emblaze VideoPro places the final compressed video file—denoted by the .ev2 file extension and associated HTML page, with the video stream nicely tagged in the source code—in the original file's folder on the hard disk. To get the video up and running for the world to see, you need only copy the tag from the HTML page.

By design, Emblaze VideoPro is a unicast product only—transmitting on-demand streams as clients request them. A GEO Interactive developer told me that one 300MHz Pentium II server on a 100Mbps Ethernet connection can supply roughly 1500 Emblaze VideoPro on-demand streams without significantly hampering server performance. If you want multicasting abilities from Emblaze VideoPro, you must wait for a future product release. You won't find server-to-server tools, authentication, security, or accounting features in Emblaze VideoPro, either. This software does one thing and one thing only—it enables streaming video on a Web site with little effort. In accomplishing that purpose, Emblaze VideoPro does a great job.

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