Tandberg makes enterprise HDTV easy

An initial question we asked when adding HDTV to the 10GbE switch test platform was whether or not such technology would be useful in the enterprise.

Actually, HDTV is making huge enterprise strides because it produces images that are vastly better than those of traditional television. Image quality can be critical for some business applications. For example, HDTV shows engineering images in tiny, vital design details that might otherwise be invisible with regular video, making it possible to hold design discussions over long distances.

Plus, most modern computer monitors can display HDTV images without a problem, thereby adding to the attractiveness of HDTV in the corporate environment. Odds are good that you already have some of the hardware you need.

Tandberg Television’s high-definition solutions fit right in. The new E5780 High Definition Encoder feeds high definition signals over a standard Fast Ethernet connection to one or more TT1280 High Definition Decoders elsewhere on the network. We found that setting up the encoder with its Web-based configuration screen was fairly simple, although it is necessary to have at least some background in video to understand a few of the settings, such as video and audio bandwidth requirements, frame rates, compression rates, etc. Configuring the TT1280 Decoder is even easier, as all of its settings are accessible from buttons and the LCD screen on the front panel.

One of the key settings for the Tandberg video-over-IP devices is the choice of bandwidth available for the signal. In general, the more bandwidth, the better the image, up to a certain point (if you surpass the amount of bandwidth an image actually needs, the extra bandwidth will be wasted).

We chose an 80Mbps video stream to provide traffic for the 10-Gig switch tests. However, you can set this figure much lower and still get excellent image results; changing the setting is simply a matter of choosing a new number in the configuration screen. If there’s a lot of action and movement in the image, for example, it will degrade sooner than a relatively stable image, so a higher setting maintains quality.

One significant benefit is Tandberg’s forward error correction, which corrects losses and other image-degrading errors on the fly. This feature works so well that we had to disable it during testing, or we never would have known when the 10-Gig switches were dropping packets.

Overall, Tandberg’s high definition encoder/decoder pair for IP worked superbly. The images were everything you’d expect from HDTV, and better than we expected given our experience with regular video over IP in the the last 10-Gig test. This product is without question a best-of-breed solution for enterprise video.