We are attending NAB Show in Las Vegas this year. If you would like to meet us, please let us know. For more information about the show - click here.

You can also call us +1 678 559 8206.

MotionDSP has licensed MediaLooks’ QuickTime Source DirectShow Filter for one of its products. MotionDSP is a privately held company backed by NVIDIA and In-Q-Tel, headquartered in San Mateo, California. MotionDSP designs software that improves video from various sources such as mobile phones and surveillance cameras.

Optibase (NASDAQ:OBAS) has licensed MediaLooks’ Video Mixer and Audio Mixer DirectShow filters for its Media Gateway application.

Optibase Media Gateway (MGW) products are professional MPEG encoders designed to stream high definition and standard definition H.264, MPEG-4, MPEG-2 and MPEG-1 video on many types of networks.

About Optibase

Optibase is a leading provider of advanced IPTV solutions for corporate, government, military and education markets, as well as pioneering ingest solutions for the broadcast industry. The company products feature state-of-the-art high definition and standard definition streaming platforms supporting the latest video formats in the market: H.264, MPEG-4, MPEG-2 and MPEG-1.

Inova Solutions chose MediaLooks Screen Capture to be utilized in its award-winning call center reporting software.

Inova’s call center reporting solutions simplify the complexity of call center management. Advanced middleware gathers operational data from ACDs and workforce management systems, and filters it down to just your most important key performance indicators, such as average handle time and abandon rate.

About Inova Solutions

Inova Solutions is a global provider of real-time visual communication solutions. Through the innovative use of technology, Inova Solutions helps organizations communicate faster and more effectively. The offering encompasses award-winning call center reporting software and hardware, mass notification systems for schools and universities, and Power over Ethernet (PoE) network clocks.

Ninsight (France) has licensed Flash overlay and Quicktime source filters and is going to utilize the technology in its leading products: Ayato and e-XS platform.

The Ayato System is a solution for captioning and subtitling designed for the broadcasting industry.

Medialooks technology will be also used in Prographic Commander which is planned for the 2009 NAB Show and currently under test with Ninesight partners. Prographic Commander is a part of e-XS platform - “all-in-one” solution with the non-linear graphics editor. Dedicated to sport and live events, Commander has been developed to replace tedious scripts and graphics programs, often too complicated to implement.

About Ninsight

For the past 8 years, Ninesight has been developing a complete range of software dedicated to broadcasting. Ninesight competency covers broadcast Automation and Digital Asset Management, Off line and Live Subtitling, Dynamic Broadcast Graphics and CG.

DeckLink SDK has been licensed to Next Media Factory, France.

If you have a camera or capture card, you cannot use it in more than one application at the same time, and there is no standard Windows option that makes it possible. MediaLooks Virtual Device Splitter splits a single input stream, such as from a capture board or camera, into several steams and presents each stream as a separate virtual device. This allows to deliver the same content to several applications at the same time.

MediaLooks scaling and audio resampling technologies, utilized in the product, enable optional adjustment of the output stream parameters separately for each receiving application. Virtual Device Splitter supports various video capture cards.

An audio decoder filter is now available for download at the MediaLooks web site. The filter is based on ISO/IEC and ATSC standards and supports the following audio codecs: MPEG-1 Audio Layer 1 (MP1), MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2 (MP2), MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3), AC-3 and AAC. MPEG-2 audio extensions are also supported.

All decoders are implemented in a single filter, which allows it to switch between decoding patterns dynamically - without reconnecting the graph. This is useful in IPTV applications, particularly for channel switching.

Pricing for this filter is royalty free.

Blackmagic Design Inc. has recently announced DeckLink SDI and Decklink Studio, new models of capture cards specifically designed as a replacement for standard definition cards, but with increased analog connectivity for wide compatibility with older analog equipment as well as SD and HD-SDI for the latest digital equipment.

MediaLooks historically provides support for DeckLink video capture and playback cards in its software development kits (SDKs) designed for the Broadcasting industry, currently including DeckLink SDK, Playout SDK and Multimedia SDK. MediaLooks SDKs allow developers to easily create multimedia applications that utilize DeckLink boards.

DeckLink SDI is designed for high-end broadcast and post production customers who are working in large SDI based facilities needing many creative workstation seats at the lowest possible cost. DeckLink SDI includes the highest quality 10 bit SD/HD-SDI capture and playback, while also including features high end customers really need, such as black burst/HD tri-sync reference input, and RS-422 deck control. DeckLink SDI replaces Blackmagic Design original SD only DeckLink model, while adding PCI Express, 10 bit HD-SDI capture and playback, and reference input. DeckLink SDI is available now for only $395.

DeckLink Studio replaces the entire Blackmagic Design standard definition product line while also adding HD support, at much lower cost. DeckLink Studio features independent connections for SDI, analog component, S-Video and composite video, so all types of external video equipment can remain connected without re-cabling. DeckLink Studio also includes SDI connections that switch between SD and HD, as well as an SD only output that always outputs via a built in hardware down converter even when running in HD. The SD down converted output is great when you need to monitor your work in both SD and HD at the same time. No product on the market today has a built in high quality hardware down converter at this low price point. DeckLink Studio is shipping now, and available for only $695.

We have released a new completely rewritten version of our Time Shifting Engine (TSE) - a development component that buffers an audio/video stream to the hard drive and enables an application to play, pause and seek within the buffered data with the ability to switch between the time-shifted video and the live stream seamlessly. Any portion of the buffered data can be saved to a file. The size of the buffer is limited only by the hard drive space. Moreover, the TSE allows several processes to read from the buffer at the same time, which means that a live video stream can be split into two or more time-shifted streams, each with its own time offset. This is really easy to implement with our SDKs.

The previous version of the Time Shifting Technology was based on Microsoft’s Stream Buffer Engine - the new version implements a fully proprietary technology. The new version is more flexible in order to ease the development and fasten time to market as well as better quality characteristics and reliability.

Possible use cases include, but are not limited to:

- Time-shifted TV broadcasting. TV network affiliates from different time zones can make television programming available at a more convenient time for the local viewer than originally broadcast.

- Time-shifted capture or event-based capturing. A good approach for video surveillance and video logging applications. Instead of recording 24/7 and building an infrastructure to extract necessary data from a large number of files, event-based recording can be implemented. The Time Shifting Engine will store a pre-defined amount of data (such as 30 minutes of video) in the buffer and will dump it to a file whenever an event occurs (such as a security alarm or user command). Recording of new data to this same file can be continued.

- Time-shifted playback. A live video can be paused and resumed for playback later. While playback is paused, the live video is being recorded into the TSE. When resumed, the playback continues from the buffer. When the buffer reaches its size limit, the TSE starts removing old data so that new data can be added. Seeking back and forward (such as for skipping ads) within the buffer is also possible.

- Elimination of CPU load peaks. When performing a time-critical task (such as HD encoding), high CPU load can lead to frames being lost and not processed by the encoder. To eliminate CPU load peaks, the TSE can be inserted before the time-critical process.

The new Time Shifting Engine is likely to be integrated into an IPTV SDK - based on our MPEG-2 Transport Stream Splitter and MPEG-2 Decoder.

The TSE will be available with the Multimedia SDK. For more information please see the Time Shifting Engine page.
For testing - please download the latest version of the Multimedia SDK.

Join us at Broadcast India in Mumbai, 17-19 October at the Bombay Exhibition Center, booth number G-710. If you would like to book an appointment with a technical or sales representative, please let us know in advance. We can also provide you with a free entrance ticket.

For more information about the show, please see here.

We will be attending IBC this year. If you would like to meet up with us, please let us know. Our phone numbers will be routed to a local number in the Netherlands.

Our next planned event is Broadcast India in Mumbai 17-19 October. For more information please see our Events page.

There are 3 things that make Flash perfect for overlay over a video stream. First, the vector-based format can be scaled to HD resolutions without quality loss. Second, Flash has built-in alpha, that allows us to use high quality transparency effects. Lastly, Flash can be used to display dynamic content such as news, weather or live chat messages.

Please check our latest product - the Flash Overlay DirectShow filter.

Sometimes customers ask us why we have so many various SDKs and what is the difference. I will try to make this a bit more clear in this post.

In fact, we have only two SDKs. Both SDKs are built on a single framework, which we call the Multimedia Component Framework. The framework is a set of COM objects, each containing a DirectShow graph within. When designing this architecture, our goal was to speed up development and make a single technology accessible from any development environment such as C++, C#, Delphi or VB6.

The two SDKs are Multimedia SDK and Vision Mixer SDK. DeckLink SDK is a trimmed down version of the Multimedia SDK. Playout SDK is the play-only version (for playout applications) and the planned Ingest (Capture) SDK is the write-only version (for media logging applications). In order for the differences in the various SDK editions to be transparent we keep a comparison chart in our wiki.

There is also some confusion in the way the SDK editions are versioned. For instance, Playout SDK is currently in version 3.0.2.1, while DeckLink SDK is in 1.3.2.1, and Multimedia SDK is 1.2.2.1. Please don’t worry - the versions of internal components are always the same in all editions of the SDKs.

The Vision Mixer SDK is available in only one edition and is based on the same technology as the Video Mixer DirectShow Filter Pro (with chroma keying, geometric transforms and transparency effects).

The Vision Mixer SDK and the Multimedia SDK family are compatible with one another. That is, the output from Multimedia SDK can be an input source for the Vision Mixer SDK - and vice versa. We now have shiny brochures about these products, where you will find an scheme of the various input/output features the SDKs have. Download one for Multimedia SDK and one for Vision Mixer SDK.

The SDKs are also compatible with our other products. Such as the QuickTime Source and Flash Source filters, or the DV codecs. A new addition to this line of optional plug-ins is the Flash Overlay filter released today.

Finally, I would like to thank all our customers for their enormous input. Our products are usually the result of what our customers say, as opposed to what we think is right. Without your feedback this whole product line would simply not exist.

The new Flash Source filter is gradually moving forward, and is now in version 2.0.0.3. Given the customer feedback so far, the two major problems that we had in the first version (1.0.*.*) - performance and transparency - appear to be fixed. However, of course, minor issues still remain, and we continue to work with our customers to resolve them. Future improvements are expected as we leverage Adobe’s Open Screen Project - a recent initiative, that includes, in particular, publishing the SWF and FLV specifications.