VBrick MPEG-2 Appliance Admin Guide 99

Chapter 8

VBStar
Topics in this chapter
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
VBStar Pump. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
VBStar Record. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
VBStar FTP File Transfer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
VBStar Status. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

Introduction

A VBStar is an MPEG-2 appliance with a hard drive; an industry-first MPEG-2 video
compression and transport appliance. Capacity depends on the video bit rate. For example, a
60 GB internal drive easily holds more than 24 hours at the bit rate of 5.5 Mbps and below
and hard drives continue to get larger. Refer to the specifications for your current hard drive.
Through its "store-and-forward" mechanism, VBStar transports DVD-quality video over
wide-area networks. It extends existing video capabilities in education, government,
surveillance and transportation. With VBStar, educational lectures, corporate messages, sales
training and technical information can be encoded and recorded and the video sent – all in
one step – for on-demand viewing from any location, on site or off. Live camera video can be
recorded to disk and transferred to another VBrick over the Internet to a remote monitoring
location for near real-time viewing.
A simple remote control command enables users to record video from any source, save
MPEG-2 video to an internal disk, and send it to a VBrick appliance anywhere in the world
over an IP network. VBStar also has Serial Digital interface capability for those in the
broadcast arena. The video can be viewed on any TV or computer monitor. VBStar includes
advanced features that allow users to record one stream while viewing another. Available with
both an encoder and a decoder, VBStar includes a hard drive for internal storage and on-
screen recording and playback guides, all managed through the IR remote control. An on-