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April 2006 NASA to Bring Video “Down to Earth” with Digital Rapids Stream
Markham, Ontario: The Digital Rapids Stream real-time video encoding system will be used by NASA to send video streams to Earth from the International Space Station.
Digital Rapids Stream will form a key component of NASA’s Space Video Gateway (SVG). The SVG is being implemented to deliver live and recorded streams from the International Space Station to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and is scheduled for deployment in July. The International Space Station draws upon the scientific and technological resources of 16 nations, led by the United States. The Station is in an orbit around Earth with an altitude of 250 statute miles. Video sent by the SVG will include footage of scientific research, crew communications, space imagery, and space station equipment inspections.
Stream encoding solutions combine powerful hardware for video and audio capture and pre-processing with the intuitive Stream software, delivering real-time, multi-format media encoding. The advanced video processing features of the Stream hardware – including motion adaptive de-interlacing, scaling, filtering, and 3D motion-adaptive noise reduction – enable optimum quality and the most efficient use of bandwidth in the compressed result.
Digital Rapids Stream met NASA’s extensive qualification requirements, which subjected it to stringent environmental testing as well as technical evaluation. Stream will enable live digital standard definition video from the International Space station for the first time. Taking advantage of the DRC-2500 model’s support for both analog and digital sources, NASA will encode NTSC signals and IEEE-1394 video from the astronaut’s digital camcorders for live MPEG2 streaming and encoded files. The encoded video will be down-linked via a NASA-developed proprietary network card.
“We’re proud to be part of the NASA Space Video Gateway project, and excited to have Stream deployed in space,” said Brick Eksten, President of Digital Rapids Corporation. “Our products have continually enabled our customers to break through geographic boundaries in distributing their media content, and this is the ultimate demonstration of that.”
For more information on NASA, visit http://www.nasa.gov/. For more information on the International Space Station, visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/. For more information on Digital Rapids products, please visit www.digital-rapids.com.
About Digital Rapids Corporation – Digital Rapids is a leading developer of professional hardware and software solutions for real-time video ingest, playout, transcoding, and streaming. Product lines include Stream video ingest and transcoding solutions, Copper for the secure and error corrected distribution of digital media over diverse networks, StreamZHD and CarbonHD, an HD product line for real-time HD acquisition, playout, and transcoding. Digital Rapids products integrate seamlessly into existing post production, broadcast, and corporate environments, dramatically increasing the volume and quality of media produced while increasing productivity and lowering overall costs. Digital Rapids Corporation (www.digital-rapids.com) is headquartered in Ontario, Canada and has sales offices in California, the UK and Australia.
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