Versatile appliance serves up high-res MPEG video

by Jason Meserve

May 9, 2001 —

Vantum made its debut at the NetWorld+Interop show by demonstrating

its new line of devices for serving up high-quality MPEG video over an

IP network.

The devices look like security cameras but come with a built-in

operating system, hard drive, 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet card and audio

inputs. Video is captured and encoded into the MPEG format right on the

device. It then is streamed out and/or recorded onto the built-in hard

drive. Both live and on-demand video served from the device can be

viewed with any standards-based video player, including Cisco IPTV and

Apple QuickTime. Vantum also offers a plug-in for viewing video

directly from a Web page.

"We want to make this device as easy to use for corporate users as

an auto-focus projector," says Howdy Pierce, Vantum's president and

CEO. "All viewing and configuration functions can be accomplished via a

Web browser."

Pierce says the "secret sauce" of the device is its programming

language that is built on ECMAScript (the standardized version of

JavaScript). An included development environment enables administrators

to build applications for the camera with predefined functions, such as

"on motion detection, begin recording."

Security is the most obvious use of the device. It can serve 30

frame/sec of live video while recording a 1 frame/sec video for archive

purposes. But Pierce sees a use for ad hoc corporate communications. "A

person can go into a conference room and as soon as the lights come on,

the camera records everything, so there's automatically a record of

every meeting for people to review later," Pierce says.

Vantum's four devices - the C1, C1d, M1 and M1d - will be available

in about a month. The C series includes a built-in camera, and the C1d

has on-board storage. The M series is for companies with existing

analog cameras. Pricing ranges from $1,295 to $1,995.

Network World