Hi,

Our nonprofit has a Viewcast Niagara GoStream Plus. It appears it's dying. We're looking to upgrade to a new device, so I'd like to get opinions on quality manufacturers and units. Our budget is about $10,000, but of course saving money would be great!

Let me know if you have any thoughts, thanks,

David

You certainly could go for a new Viewcast box, nothing wrong with that.

I've built custom boxes with capture cards from Viewcast and Black Magic, and using Telestream Wirecast as the software encoder. I like it a lot! $3,000 or a little more should be plenty, you might go with a local system builder or have something built by Alienware or one of the other specialty builders.

The i7 processor is head and shoulders above any previous generations for this kind of work...

Thanks Seth. We've been having problems with our encoder recently.

Also, some malware got into it awhile back somehow.

What would you say is the best option, quality and stability wise?

- David

The best option for me is a 4u rack-mount case, with an x58 board, an i7 2600 processor, 12GB of ram, a BlackMagic Intensity Pro capture card, a firewire card, and Telestream Wirecast. Times two, because I need a primary and a backup, that's my approach to stability. With a rackmount UPS, and a KVM switch... all in a shockmount rack.

Don't know what the best option for you is. If you need someone to provide an integrated system, Viewcast has some nice solutions. Do go for the i7, though. Live encoding is processor intensive, and this proc cuts through it like butter.

Thanks Seth! That's great information.

I'd recommend you get a Matrox MXO2 with the Max option. Plenty of info about it here: Matrox MXO2 Family for PC - Stream from any camera. Anywhere. (http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/pc/mxo2_family/streaming/)

Not only is it very small and portable, when you aren't streaming via a laptop setup you can instead use it with a video edit computer. And because the MXO2 does all the grunt work for the encoding, you don't need as powerful CPU for the computer that you use for that taskl.

And it works in conjunction with TeleStream.

This should get your problem sorted for well under the $10k.

Andrew