VBrick streams views of N+I show

VBrick, which makes hardware-based MPEG encoders and decoders, is powering the video view of the show floor, with cameras mounted in the various network racks around the convention center. Each camera connects into a VBrick device, which encodes the video into MPEG-2 format and multicasts it across the show network. Currently, there’s about 40 to 50M bytes/sec of multicast traffic flowing across the network from all the cameras – each streaming at about 12M bytes/sec. The show network itself is comprised of dual Gigabit Ethernet links throughout the building, so the VBrick video traffic is barely a blip on the radar. Using the company’s StreamPlayer II software, I was able to view a few of the streams on my laptop from the pressroom (using the wired network, since a single 12M byte/sec stream would saturate the entire wireless network.) The video was nearly full screen and had a very sharp picture. VBrick is also broadcasting an MPEG-4 stream to the Internet available here through Thursday. The best way to view it is using QuickTime 6 with the streaming transport preference set to UDP. The stream is available to Windows Media Player and RealPlayer users via a free plug-in from Envivio.