At InfoComm 2017 this year, ClearOne is showing off its recently announced VIEW Pro 4K, a new line of 4K-capable, IP-based, multimedia streaming products.
The new line updates ClearOne’s existing VIEW Pro series of AV-over-IP streaming devices with the E110 4K encoder and D110 4K decoder, employing both H.264 lossless compression and H.265 high-efficiency video coding compression. The devices support 4K resolution at 60 frames-per-second. The new 4K product line delivers 4:4:4, 24-bit color multimedia streaming. It can accept a variety of video signal typses, formats and resolutions and seamlessly distribute them over an existing IP network.
Why should integrators and end users alike be excited about VIEW Pro’s new line? Price, latency, and licensing.
“What we find is that there are a few different concerns,” says Lewis Eig, ClearOne’s sales director for network video and audio distribution. “Often we come into an environment where an integrator is not very familiar with AV-over-IP and we need to bring them up to speed of why they shouldn’t be scared of crossing the line into the wonderful world of AV-over-IP.
“If we get into an environment where we’ve got an integrator that has already done some projects with AV-over-IP, what they do when they come our way is discover that AV-over-IP doesn’t mean they need 400 megabits per second, 800 per second or 10 gigabits per second for a video stream. They can do it with just a trickle of data instead of a massive piling of data.
“If we come upon an integrator that’s already in the H.264 camp but not using VIEW Pro, they find that they can do it at half the price than they’re used to, or they can do it at much lower latency than they’re used to seeing.”
Part of the reason for the affordability of the VIEW Pro line is a unique aspect of how licenses features. Instead of selling capabilities in different boxes, ClearOne uses a one-time licensing fee of ClearOne’s existing View Pro products, offering unique combinations of standard features, proprietary technology, and customizable software licenses. The software is pre-installed into each unit and licenses for each can be activated at any time if and when needed for a one-time, per-device fee. These licenses include:
- PANORAMA video-wall, video-windowing, video-composition software designed to replace dedicated video wall processors
- RTSP/UDP streaming supports interoperability between VIEW Pro encoders and decoders and any 3rd-party system that supports the codec and transport protocols
- Local playback supports playing of video files stored in a thumb drive plugged into the decoder
- StreamNet® audio, applicable to both encoder and decoder upgrades the company’s VIEW encoder/decoder products to operate in the VIEW Pro’s environment.
- Audio mixing that supports mixing input from a variety of different audio sources
“To make VIEW Pro so affordable we decided one attribute would be to have features that not every product needs. We license those as a one-time fee to enable additional feature sets into these encoders and decoders,” says Eig. “The one that’s getting the most attention is our ability to do video windowing and video wall processing all within the encoders and decoders. So there isn’t a separate box you have to buy, it’s simply a license to enable that encoder or decoder to build a video wall or to build video windows on a single display.
“We give you a piece of software that makes it easy. It’s a very graphical, very easy to use environment. It’s able to work with Crestron, AMX, or whatever type of control system the client may have. So it becomes an extremely flexible ecosystem of devices. Really a mesh network that grows as the client’s needs change. And because it’s so little bandwidth it means that we can go on the client’s existing data network.”
The price is far from the only draw for the VIEW Pro line. Other VIEW Pro 4K features include:
- VIEW CONSOLE configuration management software, giving integrators a comprehensive, yet easy-to-use platform for configuring, monitoring and controlling installations
- VIEW Virtual Matrix software, which displays a snapshot of an entire system on one screen, as well as providing simple source/destination selection & control
- Support for an unlimited range of clients, media players and other devices, including those from Apple, Microsoft, WOWZA and more
- Supports 1080p streaming
“These devices are extremely agile and flexible,” says Eig. “They can do almost anything you want them to do. I can rotate the image, do text overlays, cropping and scaling. I had a client come up to me at a trade show and say they had been talking to all kinds of expensive video wall processor manufacturers. All they were looking to do was take the crawl of text across the bottom of ESPN, for instance, crop that out, and move it up to the top of the screen. Nobody had been able to show them how to do that in other software and video wall processors. I showed them in two minutes, in three easy steps, how to remove the crawl, resize the video window, and move it to the top.”
The VIEW Pro E110 4K and D110 4K are scheduled for availability in August 2017.
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