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The more I test Windows NT video solutions, the more the assortment of products on the market impresses me. This month I tested Cisco Systems' IP/TV intranet video-distribution software and two very different color digital video cameras: Connectix's Color QuickCam 2 and Toshiba's IK-M28.

IP/TV 2.0 leverages Cisco's extensive network and routing experience to provide a truly enterprise video-distribution solution. The Connectix and Toshiba cameras prove that those companies know how to do video for the NT platform.

IP/TV 2.0
Cisco's IP/TV 2.0 is a LAN-based solution for distributing video, audio, and PowerPoint slides across your network. The IP/TV solution includes three distinct components: IP/TV Server, IP/TV Content Manager, and IP/TV Viewer. You can run the IP/TV software only on an IP-based network. Cisco recommends that your network have Domain Name System (DNS) resolution, but you don't need DNS resolution to use IP/TV.

Unlike Microsoft's NetShow Services, IP/TV doesn't work across Internet dial-up connections. IP/TV specifically targets WAN and LAN implementations.

IP/TV Server. The machine that runs IP/TV Server is a repository for all the video, audio, and still-image data you distribute across your network. You must add a Moving Pictures Experts Group-1 (MPEG-1) encoding card to your server to distribute realtime video streams from videocassette recorders (VCRs) or camcorders across your network. (If you use an MPEG-1 encoding card, you must install and configure the MPEG-1 card before you install the IP/TV Server software.)

Cisco recommends the FutureTel PrimeView II Combo MPEG-1 encoding card, so I installed one on my test IP/TV server. You use one audio cable and one video cable to connect a standard VCR to the back of your video server's full-length ISA card this connection lets you broadcast video that the VCR plays across your network in realtime. The encoding card encodes the video in MPEG-1 format, which produces a 352 * 240 display and uses roughly 1.2 megabits per second (Mbps) of network bandwidth. IP/TV Server can digitize and store a video on the server's hard disk while you encode and distribute it. In addition to the MPEG-1 codec (coder-DECoder), IP/TV supports Intel's Indeo Video 5.04 and Precept's H.261 codecs through Microsoft's ActiveMovie architecture, and supports Intel's Indeo Video 3.2 and Microsoft's (formerly VXtreme's) Web Theater codecs through Microsoft's Video for Windows.

Video content is generally very large (often larger than 1GB). Therefore, Cisco recommends that administrators who will use IP/TV to distribute video streams connect numerous hard disks to their IP/TV server or dedicate a cabinet of hard disks to video content. If you follow this advice, you need to use NT Server's RAID tools or a RAID controller card to configure the hard disks as one drive before you install the IP/TV Server software. IP/TV recognizes only one hard drive per server for on-demand content. Cisco recommends using hardware-accelerated RAID 0 with SCSI hard disks to ensure high performance.

IP/TV is a great enterprise solution. The IP/TV server transmits video streams via a range of formats: multicast, Video on Demand (VoD), or live encoding. (For more information about types of video transmissions you can play across a network, see the sidebar "Video Distribution," page 88). You can limit the amount of bandwidth IP/TV streams consume so that if the video server receives an unusually high number of requests for VoD streams, the video transfers won't hobble your network. IP/TV also saves bandwidth by monitoring which nodes request video streams and broadcasting to only those nodes. If no clients request a scheduled program, the IP/TV server doesn't broadcast the video stream, but it does track the stream's progress via a timestamp.

When a client requests an audio or video stream, IP/TV Content Manager delegates the broadcast to the server that has the most bandwidth available. An upcoming release of IP/TV will enhance this capability with proximity awareness IP/TV Content Manager will determine which server provides clients broadcast streams by evaluating servers' traffic levels and their proximity to the client. To facilitate distribution of content among servers, IP/TV Server includes Cisco's FTP Server application.

IP/TV Content Manager. You use the IP/TV Content Manager to coordinate the distribution of video, audio, and slide streams. (Slides require a separate IP/TV server.) IP/TV Content Manager comprises several applications, including a Java Web server, Perl, and FTP Server.

IP/TV Content Manager lets users with administrative privileges configure when, how, and how often IP/TV content is available to users and which servers hold which content. IP/TV Content Manager lets you schedule multicast transfers and FTP file exchanges between servers, use passwords to restrict access to IP/TV content, make content available on an on-demand basis, and track who accesses which information and when they access it. IP/TV Content Manager also provides descriptions of available programming to IP/TV end users and points clients to the server that can best provide the content they request. When a server begins transmitting a stream to a viewer, IP/TV Content Manager has completed its role in the transmission process.

You need to install IP/TV Content Manager and IP/TV Server on separate machines. Running both programs on the same system reduces the system's functionality. You configure IP/TV Content Manager by accessing the software through any Web browser. You use IP/TV Content Manager to define most of your network's parameters. The main IP/TV Content Manager interface has eight icons: OnDemand Programs, Scheduled Programs, Channels, Recordings, File Transfers, Servers, ServerWatch, and Preferences, as Screen 1 shows.

You use the OnDemand Programs and Scheduled Programs icons to enter new programs into the list of available broadcasts, edit existing program information, set password authorization, and set the times that each video is available. You use the Channels icon to create a menu of broadcast titles.

The Recordings utility lets you define the parameters for your IP/TV servers' audio and video recordings you can define the filename, source, server, and times at which IP/TV records each audio or video segment. You can configure the software to record at a specific time on a specific day. IP/TV uses date and time information to generate unique filenames for successive recordings.

The File Transfers utility coordinates the distribution of content among IP/TV servers. You can schedule content distribution to suit your organization's needs, transferring IP/TV files between servers only during off-peak hours. You select the Servers icon to see a centralized database of all the servers your IP/TV network recognizes the database includes Multicast Backbone (MBone) servers.

If you select the Preferences icon, IP/TV Content Manager opens a window that contains most of the core settings for your IP/TV implementation. In the Preferences window, you define your IP/TV servers' multicast addresses, define the video and audio formats your system supports, limit the network bandwidth that on-demand requests consume, and limit the number of concurrent recordings and file transfers.

IP/TV Viewer. End users can receive multiple broadcasts simultaneously through the IP/TV Viewer or through Netscape Navigator 3.x or later or Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 3.x or later. (You must install the plugins that come with IP/TV to use Navigator or IE to view IP/TV broadcasts.) I ran four concurrent streams on an Intergraph Computer Systems TDZ 2000 ViZual Workstation, which has dual 333MHz Pentium II processors, as Screen 2 shows. The four transmissions consumed 80 percent to 90 percent of my CPUs' power and 90MB of RAM.

Users can customize the IP/TV Viewer toolbar. However, I didn't find any reason to customize any of the IP/TV interfaces. All the interfaces have straightforward and intuitive designs. I was pleased to find that all the IP/TV interfaces extensively support right-clicking. A particularly nice feature of the IP/TV Viewer is that the software lets you remove the video window from the Web interface and run the video through a separate window. You can use your Web browser while you watch an IP/TV video.

If you need to implement distributed video throughout your organization, whether your network includes 10 computers or 10,000 computers, IP/TV suits your needs. The server and network-management tools provide all the functionality you need to make this solution work. The software's realtime encoding and distribution are impressive, and IP/TV is easy to use compared with other video solutions.

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