Distributing video through a school

[atomstryker]

My school wants to distribute pre-recorded and maybe later, live video. We have fiber in all the classrooms, which goes into cisco switches in every room, then into computers. There are televisions in every room also. I know that one option is to run coax throughout the school, but that would cost far too much, and the school wouldn't pay for it. Any ideas for running video over the fiber?

 

[atomstryker]

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[ScottMac]

My two personal favorites:

Cisco IPTV
VBrick

VBrick is more of a converter; feed it video, it puts it on out over Ethernet to a client on the PCs. I believe that they now can also feed a TV (via composite or S-Vid) directly at the receive end. Of course, "live" can be a tape deck, camera, DVD, whatever. I like the VBrick, they keep it cheaper by allowing you to choose the level of encode by-the-box (one box does only MPEG1, one box does only MPEG2, one box does MPEG4 (very nicely), and they have models that do a mix, you get to choose. www.vbrick.com

The Cisco IPTV is more of a encode / store / Video-on-demand (over Ethernet).... but it will also do live, and it has a hardware MPEG encoder that does a pretty good job. Pretty big bucks ... but since it's for a school, they won't mind burning another bushel of hard-earned taxpayer dollars so the chillen can watch "Scooby-Doo Does Addition (grade 12)" (j/k :-}).

The IPTV comes in several flavors: There's a "Starter Kit" (one box does everything) and there's also separate encode/broadcast, storage, and control units designed to cluster. They'll multicast or unicast, live or Video-on-Demand.

If you just want to pass video (and audio) over UTP/Cat5, then there are a number of BALUNs and adapters to do that. Check out a lucent (probably Avaya now) 380A adapter: it's composite video and two audio channels over UTP - The specs say it can do several THOUSAND feet over Cat5, and it will, with some loss of quality. IT'll do 100 Meters standing on it's head though - I use 'em at home - no noticeable degradation in the video.

Unicom has a (slightly) cheaper alternative, the model number is VAA-U501-VA. Same thing, composite video and two audio channels. Avaya and probably Unicom may have S-Vid units too.

I have and / or have used all of the above. It all works very well.

Good Luck

Scott