Trail Blazers' Opening Night Win Streamed Live Online

Submitted by Eli on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 16:43

Since the Portland Trail Blazers are kind of a big deal around these parts, I was excited to hear that they would be "the first team in the NBA to stream games online."  With Major League Baseball showing excellent results from its online streaming (in both the quality and business sense), it's good to see the NBA working to polish their online solution.  After my first experience, though, while it's clear the potential is there, it definitely needs work.  Click through for the full post.

Blazers online stream

Image courtesy of Mike Rogoway, The Oregonian

First, there are caveats to the Blazers' streaming.  Some of the big ones include:

  • It costs money:  either $3.99 per game or $39.99 for all 15.
  • Second, the 15 games being streamed are the same 15 that are being broadcast on KGW Channel 8 (Portland's local NBC affiliate).  None of the games broadcast on cable are being streamed online.  Third, because of NBA broadcast requirements, the team is only allowed to stream games within their broadcast territory, which is about a 150-mile radius.  Those outside the radius must purchase NBA League Pass Broadband, which costs between $89.95 and $149.95 depending on the package. 
  • NBA guidelines do not currently permit phone or mobile device streaming, which would be a handy feature.

So for usability's sake, there are some kinks to work out, but I guess you need to start somewhere.

Now for my experience.  On Tuesday night, I fired up my Lenovo ThinkPad notebook (2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, Vista 32, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M), but made the mistake of purchasing right at game time since I was mainly curious about the stream instead of actually relying on it (I was also watching in HD on my 40-inch LCD).  The site was bogged down so it took quite awhile for anything to process.  I had to create an account, install the RayV player software, and launch the stream.  Finally, after about 10-15 minutes, it started "loading" and I thought I was up and running.  But then I never got a picture.  I tried the "Low" bandwidth instead of the "High," but in that case I didn't even get a "loading" message.  It wasn't until the second quarter that I was able to reboot my system and get a stream to come through.  Finally!

The stream, which was about 14 seconds behind KGW's broadcast, looked pretty sharp in the small window.  The stream's bitrate was generally around 1.2 Mbps and when I went fullscreen on my 14-inch laptop, I could see pixels, but it was generally smooth.  Overall, I was satisfied by the quality, even when I used a VGA cable for playback on my TV.  If it were my only viewing option, I certainly would not have complained.  It did need to buffer occasionally and the "Low" bandwidth option was still dead for me, but luckily my connection handled "High" just fine.  The audio also cut out for a good chunk of the third and fourth quarters, which was frustrating, and then when it came back it was out of sync, messing up Travis Outlaw's southern drawl in his postgame interview.  The RayV player is nice and clean, though.  It has DVR options (which I used for a Martell Webster dunk), tells you statistics about your stream, and even has widgets in case you want to plug into Facebook or Twitter.

The Oregonian's Mike Rogoway also documented his experience and gleaned a couple interesting facts from the Blazers' marketing department:  

  1. About 500 users watched the game online.
  2. There were two system-wide outages caused by a failure on the team's servers and then a failure at the NBA's servers in Atlanta.

Overall, even with my tempered expectations, I would give the experience a C grade.  It was frustrating not getting a stream up until the second quarter and being without audio late in the game.  As it stands right now, I would do anything I could to find another means of watching the next game before I would purchase the online streaming option again, instead waiting for others' feedback to see if there was improvement.  It will be very interesting to see what kind of strides are made as the season progresses—here at Elemental we'll be paying close attention!

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Announcing Multi-GPU Support with Elemental Accelerator 2.2

Submitted by Lisa on Fri, 10/23/2009 - 13:06

Elemental is pleased to announce the release of Elemental Accelerator 2.2 for Windows, an important update to its GPU-accelerated video processing plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4. With the release of 2.2, Elemental Accelerator provides support for video encoding using multiple NVIDIA Quadro FX GPUs.  Multi-GPU functionality efficiently divides the encoding workload among all supported GPUs in a system, radically increasing overall export speed and performance. A multi-GPU implementation is well-suited to platforms with multiple PCI-E slots available to accommodate more than one NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics card, such as Z Series workstations from HP and ThinkStation workstations from Lenovo.
Supported multi-GPU configurations are:

•    2 x NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800
•    2 x NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800
•    2 x NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800

Although performance improvements will vary depending on GPU(s), video source and export settings, Elemental Accelerator provides a dramatic speed increase over the standard CPU-only encoder when leveraging multiple GPUs. In the following test case, encoding AVCHD 1080p source video to H.264 720p output can be performed nearly six times faster with Elemental Accelerator than with the standard encoder available with Adobe Premiere Pro.

multi-GPU benchmarks

Release 2.2 also expands the lineup of GPUs supported by Elemental Accelerator. The NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700 graphics card and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M, 2800M and 1800M mobile GPUs have been added to the suite of NVIDIA GPUs that will run with Elemental Accelerator, giving more options than ever to video professionals, particularly those creating content on-the-go. For a complete list of supported GPUs, please visit the Elemental Accelerator specifications page on the Elemental website.

In addition, release 2.2 of Elemental Accelerator offers new H.264 and MPEG-2 presets for a variety of target applications, including presets designed specifically for the iPhone and for Blu-ray.

If you are an existing Accelerator customer, be sure and visit the Elemental updates site to download and install release 2.2. Customers installing from a CD or web package for the first time can elect to update immediately after an initial install.

For users who already own RapiHD or Elemental Accelerator, you can easily upgrade to the newest version. To access an update:

1.    Launch Adobe Premiere Pro CS4
2.    Navigate to the Export Settings dialog box
3.    Select the More Info tab
4.    Press the Check for updates button

This will automatically direct you to the Elemental Accelerator update site.

Elemental Accelerator 2.2 is made exclusively for NVIDIA Quadro GPUs. On the desktop, Elemental Accelerator works with the Quadro CX as well as the Quadro FX 5800, 4800, 3800, 3700 and 1800. On mobile platforms, Elemental Accelerator works with the Quadro FX 3800M, 2800M, 1800M, 3700M and 2700M. Elemental Accelerator is available for purchase as a standalone package from NVIDIA’s Adobe plug-in store or bundled with supported Quadro FX graphics cards from a variety of resellers.

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Standing Room Only at Lunch 2.0

Submitted by Andy on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 11:39

Lunch 2.0 at Elemental Panorama

Yesterday, we set a new record at Elemental, thanks to the overwhelming attendance at this month's Lunch 2.0: our conference room's largest meeting to date! There was no need for the HVAC system as 60 or so guests, ranging from software developers to entreprenuers to video industry reps, generated enough heat in our intimate office. Attendees enjoyed a Kettleman's lunch and a demonstration of Elemental's product suite by software engineers Greg and Davy and product manager Lisa. We were thrilled to have such a diverse and interested crowd join us to talk about the opportunities and challenges of online video and video compression. Thanks to all who attended for the interesting conversation and engaging questions both at the event and afterward. Here are some of our favorite tweets:

arih: Thanks @elementaltech for hosting Lunch 2.0! Very cool technology for parallel video processing.

lisacicala: Learning about video compression tools at Lunch 2.0 with @elementaltech.

ike6: Thanks to @siliconflorist for the tip on Lunch 2.0 at@elementaltech! Daily dose of smart folks doing cool stuff in Portland!

We agree. The inventive technology and supportive community is why we love Portland - see you at tech events around town!

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Elemental's Out and About in Portland

Submitted by Julie on Tue, 10/20/2009 - 12:43

Fresh off back-to-back demos of Elemental products over in Amsterdam at IBC and down in California at the GPU Technology Conference and Adobe Max, we figured it was about time to give the home turf some love.  Just like our software, we’re catering to multiple audiences, so whether you’re a software developer, investor, videographer or just a curious technology enthusiast, there’s an opportunity for you to check us out this week or next week.

Wednesday, 10/21, 12 to 2 p.m. : Elemental hosts Lunch 2.0

Elemental Technologies, 620 SW Fifth Ave.

If you’ve never been before or attend every month, Lunch 2.0 is always different (new food, new faces, new technology).  According to organizer Jake Kuramoto, “Portland Lunch 2.0 is a networking event, and we like it that way. Because it’s during the day and not as tech-focused as other Portland events, you’ll see new faces. But never fear, you’ll also see the familiar faces you also see at the myriad of evening and weekend events.”

We’ll be serving a Kettleman Bagels and Paradise Bakery buffet and talking about building an enterprise product UI on Ruby, getting online video distributed in mass and tips for video creation in Adobe CS4.

Call if you get lost: 503.222.3212 

 

Thursday, 10/29, 9 to 5 p.m. : Elemental presents at Venture NW

The Nines, 525 SW Morrison St.

At this year’s Venture NW conference (conveniently at the Nines across the street from Elemental HQ), CEO Sam Blackman will present around 11 a.m. on Elemental’s business model, product suite and position within the online video marketplace as one of eleven of “the area's hottest emerging Northwest businesses.”

OEN's Venture Northwest (formerly Venture Oregon) is an annual conference that draws institutional investors and investment bankers from across the Western U.S. who are interested in emerging Northwest businesses and the region's growth segments, according the conference site. Notable entrepreneurial keynote presentations, include: Zeba – Absorbent Technologies, Tripwire, Insight Schools, Inc. and Ater Wynne.

It looks like you can still register to attend (including both academic and full suit prices). 

 

Thursday, 10/29, 6:30 p.m. : Elemental speaks at Refresh Portland

Jive, 915 SW Stark St., Suite 400

And later that evening, VP of Marketing Andy Beach, will be giving out free tips about video compression for the web at Refresh Portland. According to Andy:

“Creating high quality video content for the web is not quite as simple as whipping out your Flip HD, then uploading to YouTube. That said, it's a lot easier than most people know (and doesn't require a two-hour uploading annoyance). We should all be putting more videos online, after all it's the fastest growing and most popular communication vehicle on the web, but there are better ways to do it.”

Refresh Portland meets every fourth Thursday (given October is a long month this time) at Jive Software located in the heart of Portland, right off of SW Burnside. Show up at 6:30 PM to catch the presentation, and join us for dinner and drinks at Deschutes Brewery right afterwards.

One lucky attendee will take home a signed copy of Andy’s book, Real World Video Compression. Heck, knowing Andy, if you start talking video codecs, he’ll probably also buy you a drink at Deschutes afterwards.

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The Quadro FX 3800 with Elemental Accelerator for CS4

Submitted by Lisa on Wed, 10/14/2009 - 16:23

Jeff Pulera of Safe Harbor features the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 with Elemental Accelerator in a recent product spotlight blog post. Jeff performed extensive benchmarking using Elemental Accelerator with the Quadro FX 3800 card, testing both H.264 and MPEG-2 encoding performance as well as scaling video for a variety of target applications and devices, including Blu-ray, DVD, YouTube and iPod. In most cases, Elemental Accelerator performed video encoding faster than real time and in all cases, Elemental Accelerator outperformed the standard CPU-only encoder. Click here to check out Jeff's comprehensive write-up and performance metrics and learn more about using Elemental Accelerator for fast GPU-based encoding from a video professional!

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Lights, Camera, Streaming!

Submitted by Greg on Thu, 10/01/2009 - 10:48

It’s been an exciting (and busy) summer at Elemental. In addition to heavy development of Elemental Server, our file-based transcoding solution, we started thinking about how to apply our GPU encoding technology to support streaming live events over the web. In today's world of adaptive bitrate streaming, live encoding solutions need to support significantly more streams than in the early days of web broadcasting.  The density of streams that we can achieve using GPUs is far beyond that of CPU-only solutions, so it’s a natural extension of our technology.

I learned a very valuable lesson while working on live encoding...never show something to a CEO that you aren't ready to show to the world.  One Friday back in July, I was playing around with an HD-SDI input card and a signal generator.  After a few hours of coding, I had a video stream of some fancy color bars being encoded in real time, and showed a few people around the office.  Sam, our CEO, caught wind of this and got so excited he said, "Hey, Jen-Hsun Huang (CEO of NVIDIA) is dropping by the office this afternoon, do you think we can have this ready to demo for him?"  In the startup world, things move fast ... but usually you get more than just a couple hours to prepare a demo for external viewing!  A few rebuilds later, Jen-Hsun showed up at Elemental world headquarters (earning cheers by bringing with him a couple cases of beer) and we were able to show off our first live H.264 stream produced on an NVIDIA GPU. Now that I'd shown this to two CEOs, there were sure to be painful repercussions ...

software engineer greg streaming GPU Technology Conference with Elemental Server

Command central for live streaming at the GPU Technology Conference: Software Engineer Greg and two Elemental Servers

Fast forward a couple of months: I find myself and a couple Elemental Servers sitting in a cramped hallway on the catwalk above the GPU Technology Conference main stage. With only a few months of development under our belts, NVIDIA had asked us to provide the encoding for webcasting of all the keynote speeches for their conference in San Jose.  After months of late nights put in by the Elemental Server engineering team and with the great help of the webcasting magicians at iStreamPlanet, we successfully streamed the conference out to the world in real time. You can check out the archives at http://www.nvidia.com/gtc.

The amount of work that goes into creating, producing and streaming an event like the GPU Technology Conference is massive and it takes a lot of talented people to pull it off. While encoding for the web is one of the fundamental pieces of this process, the webcast producers have many other variables to deal with and they need the encoder to be a rock-solid piece of equipment that they can “set and forget.” There is no margin for error when it comes to streaming a live event; the encoder needs to be up, the network must maintain consistent  throughput, the video player must be live on the web site and pointed at the correct stream, and the on-demand archives must be put online as soon as possible. Getting to experience this process firsthand has given me and the engineering team quite a few new ideas for our live encoding product. We’ll be sure to do everything we can to enable companies like iStreamPlanet to continue streaming more and more live content to the web. Though it was pretty stressful introducing new technology on such short notice to a worldwide audience, Elemental was up to the challenge and the event marked another milestone in the evolution of GPU computing!

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