Introduction

Before video can be streamed it must go through several processing stages. Streaming video starts with a television camera, which may be combined with other cameras in a switcher. Alternatively, the signal is recorded for later editing. The second stage is to convert the video to a computer file format, an operation called capture or ingest. Finally, it can be processed by the streaming encoder.

There are many similarities between television and computer video, but there are minor differences in the standards and formats that are relevant to capture. This chapter gives an overview of the broadcast television standards for the reader who may be more familiar with computer formats like AVI and QuickTime. This chapter also covers the many tape formats you will encounter, and the different interconnections that can be used between the tape deck and the encoding workstation.

Although we live in a digital world, there is still much legacy analog equipment in use in video production. We must not forget that the majority of television viewers still watch an analog transmission, and the changeover to digital reception may not happen until 2010, varying from country to country. The pioneers in digital transmission have been the satellite operators, where the driving force for the deployment of digital transmission (using the MPEG-2 standard) has been ability to transmit four to six times the number of channels within a given transponder bandwidth. An overview has to start in the analog domain.

Essentially, television is the reproduction...