AmberFin Announces New Transcode Farm Controller & Network Licence Server for iCR

AmberFin Announces New Transcode Farm Controller & Network Licence Server for iCR 03 Dec 2013

In an environment where leading analyst house, IHS Electronics and Media reports a continued global reduction in TV sales against predicted major increases in file transcoding resources where the real winner will be in multi-format transcoding needed for multi-screen OTT distribution, AmberFin, a leading developer of file-based media ingest, transcoding and quality control solutions for content owners, broadcasters, sports organizations and post-production houses has introduced new enterprise-class features for iCR, the companys file-based content ingest and transcoding system.

The company claims that AmberFin iCR's new enterprise-class features will enable the creation of transcode farms that are scalable from one to many nodes whilst always providing fault tolerant operation. With AmberFin iCR, media facilities of all sizes, scales and business models can scale up an initial proof of concept to whatever system capacity they require without needing any kind of external orchestration system and in doing so dynamically support their business development strategy.

The new iCR Transcode Farm Controller functionality builds on AmberFin's market leading multi-format transcode capabilities. It significantly increases the flexibility and versatility of a multi-node transcode environment, bringing improved resilience and robustness whilst simultaneously bringing cost savings through more versatile network licensing capabilities.

The iCR platform makes intelligent use of a media facility's resources, while making complicated workflows simple to operate for the end user, comments Bruce Devlin, Chief Technology Officer at AmberFin. As the IHS reports clearly illustrate, today media facilities need efficient and resilient multi-format transcode resources to feed the multi-screen revolution. With AmberFin iCR, those transcode farms need not be massive nor expensive. We have developed a remarkably simple enterprise-class transcode farm solution which works equally well in a single node proof of concept and a 100 node multi-workstation farm environment.

AmberFin Transcode Farm Controller

In today's increasingly file-based media workflows, file transcode operations have assumed critical importance. With media facilities both receiving and distributing content as media files, an efficient Transcode Farm Controller is essential. With the new iCR Transcode Farm Controller the transcode segment of the workflow is scalable, provides an appropriate level of redundancy to suit a specific application and enables a combination of high throughput and advanced system functionality.

The new iCR Transcode Farm Controller works by providing a single, reliable, redundant interface to the iCR Transcode capabilities. Jobs are sent to the iCR Controller and behind the scenes the system architecture is sized to achieve the levels of redundancy and throughput required by that particular application. By combining the Farm Controller with AmberFin's Network Licensing Server an even larger scale model can be created with pools of transcode nodes that can dynamically float across the underlying server hardware and no longer require fixed node-to-server relationships. This achieves even greater levels of redundancy and operational efficiency over a large-scale transcode network through efficient use of available hardware nodes, irrespective of node fall out at any given time.

The combination of the Transcode Farm Controller and Network License Server adds a third dimension in terms of enhanced network functionality. It provides floating software licenses for occasional functions, such as standards conversion, captioning, Dolby, audio processing and watermarking.

Network License Server

Part of the company's enterprise class workflow concept, AmberFin iCRs Network License Server enables facilities to use the same technology in both a single standalone Desktop PC running as the proof of concept as well as in a network of 100 or more servers / blades / VMs. Furthermore, each iCR node is installed from a single installer that contains the entire suite of iCR functionality. The license given to the node at run-time defines how that node will behave. This makes feature addition a real breeze as only the central license server needs updating none of the nodes need to be touched.

Another key feature of the Network License Server is its ability to ensure that a user's full capacity is always on-line. For example, if one transcoder node encounters problems, the Farm Controller will seamlessly swap the required iCR operations to a back-up node and the Network License Server will ensure it is able to carry on. Job metadata is available to allow network administrators to gauge how many jobs were delayed based on the licensing options available within the group. This feedback gives key capacity information to administrators, allowing them to manage costs, throughput and capacity of the farm.

AmberFin iCR also introduces new and sophisticated tools for adding, checking and inserting a user's custom metadata through configuration and without requiring costly code customization. The iCR metadata plug-in wizard allows users to configure the metadata they need for their organization in such a way that ingest and QC operators can automatically update and validate this information as part of a QC workflow. This metadata can then be used to control segmentation workflows, versioning workflows and can be used in simple wizards to perform the right process with the right media and right metadata at the right time.

LINK:	http://www.theiabm.org/article.php?group_id=10422...
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