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.