Encode Digital Video for Streaming

If you work with digital video and lots of video content for distribution, you would be using a collection of different tools. 

Cleaner 5 is a simple and integrated solution to all this. It’s a camera-to-web streaming solution. It converts digital video to any of the popular file formats like Real Video, Windows Media format or QuickTime. The software consists of modules that do different functions. It takes video input from files or from a DV camera directly. For the latter option, you will need to have a MotoDV compliant FireWire port on your PC (if you are using a newer Mac, you might already have it). MotoDV is the capture application that is integrated with Cleaner 5. If your content is on analog tapes or other medium, you can conveniently use a video capture card to capture it and save it locally for working on it. 

Once you’ve captured the video, Cleaner comes into the picture. The application is quite easy to use. It has a ‘Batch’ window for creating a project. From the Windows Explorer, just drag and drop all the files to be streamed into this window. To preview any clip, double-click on its name in the window. You may also add events such as a ‘Chapter’ or a ‘Title’ between clips. Now comes the part about authoring. This involves all audio and video settings, output settings and metadata. You can adjust these through a Settings Wizard’, and once you’re done, the encoding process is simply a matter of clicking the play button. The content is encoded and saved, ready to be streamed. 

MPEG SuperCharger



Cleaner 5 has limited MPEG support with only some adjustable settings whereas the popularity of MPEG-2 as a video format is well known (it is used for making VCDs and DVDs). Also, MPEG encoding and authoring is an intensive task that needs lots of processing power. With your PC already loaded with the OS and other gamut of applications, it would take significantly long times to do this job.

MPEG SuperCharger is a combination of hardware and software, exclusively designed to handle this. The hardware is a PCI card with an onboard C-Cube DVxplore video processor. This processor speeds up the MPEG encoding process significantly as all of it occurs on the hardware. The software that accompanies the card adds new functionalities and more options to Cleaner 5 application. Access these from the ‘Advanced settings’ menu we talked about earlier. You can have custom data rates (the default being for DVDs), custom display aspect ratio and many more options. 

The bottom line: The Cleaner 5 software is priced at Rs 29,950 and the MPEG SuperCharger adds another Rs 59,700 to it. So roughly at a lakh rupees, considering the high-end kind of capabilities the solution provides the price seems reasonable enough.

Ashish Sharma at PCQ Labs