cleaner central

Based on Discreet's popular cleaner technology (see related link below), cleaner central is a centralized system that allows for the automated distribution of large scale media transcoding jobs to individual transcoding machines. Job submissions can themselves entail multiple source files which can then automatically be transcoded into multiple formats, bit rates, and destinations. A long list of image, audio, and video file formats are supported for the source media files, including Windows Media, DV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, QuickTime, MP3, WAV, Photoshop, and AIFF/AIFC (among others); and those input formats can then be transcoded into multiple output formats including Windows Media, Real System, QuickTime, MP3, BMP, etc. Note that Real System files are supported for output, but not for input.

cleaner central consists of three primary software components (hardware must be provided by the customer):

- the central server, which is a Windows 2000 Server based application that controls the submission and execution of jobs across the transcoding nodes.

- the Transcoding Nodes, Windows 2000 based software that performs the actual transcoding tasks. Two nodes are included within the initial purchase price, and additional nodes can be purchased and installed dynamically (no down time) to increase the scalability of the overall transcoding system. Nodes must be individual machines; the server itself cannot additionally serve as a node.

- the Administrator/Job Submission workstations, which can be any Windows PC w/IE5.5+ or MacOS8.1 machine with IE5+. The administrator workstations allow both for the submission/definition of batch job requests, as well as the monitoring of those requests as well as server or transcoder node status.

Users of Discreet's cleaner product can utilize it to create "cleaner collections," actual job configuration settings that can then be submitted directly to cleaner central to be used when transcoding files. An individual copy of cleaner that can be used for this purpose is not, however, supplied directly with cleaner central and must be purchased separately if so desired. cleaner central is shipped with optimized settings for its supported output formats, therefore a separate cleaner purchase is not required for use.

cleaner central is now shipping, with a base price of $4,995 (server+two transcoding nodes). Additional nodes are priced at $1,495. Note that the central server requires a dedicated SQL Server 2000 with enough client access licenses to cover both the server itself and each transcoding node; SQL Server is not included with cleaner central and must be purchased separately by the customer.

Contact Discreet for further information.