Striving to give its distance students a genuine on-campus experience, the school captures every engineering lecture held in its classrooms, Monday through Friday, between 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. These are then delivered as digital lectures via video on demand. Distance students are able to watch a live stream of a lecture in real time, or download a high- or low-resolution video within 20 minutes after the class ends, thanks in big part to the Matrox® Monarch encoders.

Classroom lecture capture in progress

Purdue University’s multimedia setup for lecture capture

Researching Encoder Options

Carl Black, Purdue University’s multimedia production manager, was tasked with researching hardware encoder options to live stream lectures in their new engineering distance learning facility. With a goal of finding an easy way to stream live video, and needing a scheduling mechanism, he hoped a standalone appliance would meet his requirements versus adding another computer and having to configure the hardware and software. This is when he came across the comprehensive Matrox Monarch HD H.264 hardware encoder—priced under $1000, it met all his criteria.

Close Examination

Distance students in the “digital campus” face the same challenging curriculum and exams as in-class students. Digital lectures, through exceptional streaming and recording, help replicate the vibrant in-class experience and assist them in learning.

To produce these digital lectures, each engineering classroom is equipped with two pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras that feed audio and video signals via SDI to a video switcher located in an operator room. A production engineer from the operator room produces the audio and six video sources—two PTZ cameras trained on the lecturer, one document camera, and two laptops and a computer with presentation material—to be sent for lecture capture. The resulting output from the switcher serves as the input for the Monarch HD encoder. Every lecture being unique, it is captured and streamed at different resolutions and bitrates, to suit the varying needs of the distance students.