Portable Streaming Encoders Shrink and Grow

Record It

It seems like recording an event is often a last-minute decision. Truth be told, that decision often comes after hard work of setting up for the live streaming event is finished, the cameras and talent are in place, and it’s just about showtime. Fortunately, a number of our review units provide simple recording capabilities, although localized recording varies from device to device.

First, the bad news. The Epiphan Webcaster X2 offers streaming, but no recording. To get this level of functionality, Epiphan customers would need to move up to the Pearl Mini unit, or the Pearl 2, which has an integrated touch panel, 4K capabilities (including 12G SDI), and up to 250 hours of recording.

Now, some better news. The Magewell Ultra Stream offers multiple ways to record content. It can either take place with the internal memory or via the single USB connector. If you plan to record to a thumb drive, remember to finish up any last-minute work on the keyboard or mouse you’d previously plugged into the USB port—and once a recording starts, don’t remove the USB thumb drive. According to discussions with the company about the pre-beta Magewell Ultra Stream unit we tested, the unit will also provide recording on an internal memory chip at the quality of the input, not just at the streaming output data rates. The company is defining all of this as of the time of this writing, and this internal recording may not be part of the first firmware release.

The two contribution encoders, the Osprey Talon G1 and T-21 AVC encoder, both offer recording in the form of MPEG-2 Transport Stream (.mts) files that use the H.264 codec. The T-21 AVC encoder can record to a 5GB internal drive or a USB thumb drive.

The Osprey Talon G1 records only to a USB thumb drive. This may not be a big issue, however, as recordings on USB drives are readily accessible once the stream is complete.

I Want My RTMP!

Speaking of integration with a variety of services, East provides a good fallback: RTMP stream key entry.

But not all devices provide this functionality, which is a foolproof way to guarantee that at least one type of tried-and-true streaming format works when the social platforms update or modify their APIs. Your mileage may vary, so check with the product manufacturer to see if this is either available or coming soon in a firmware update.

That’s one of the major takeaways of this comparative look at four small-form-factor encoders: Firmware updates are inevitable as companies work to tweak the user interface, overall integration with live streaming platforms, and even the basics like RTMP or RTP streaming options.