Extron Announces Upgrade to its H.264 Streaming Media Encoder

Anaheim, California (February 4, 2013) - Extron Electronics is pleased to announce an upgrade to the popular SME 100 encoder, enabling the support of additional network and streaming protocols. The SME 100 now supports push streaming in unicast or multicast applications applying native RTP or MPEG-2 Transport Streams. Session Announcement Protocol and Session Description Protocol are applied to manage push streaming sessions. These new network and streaming protocols make the SME 100 compatible with a greater variety of third party decoding devices and streaming configurations. Other new capabilities include HTTP tunneling and closed captioning support for the EIA-608B standard. These new features are included in all SME 100 units that are shipping, and this firmware upgrade is available as a free download for current users.

"Streaming encoders are used in many different applications and network configurations. This latest firmware update supports integration into a broader variety of streaming applications, and provides compatibility with a greater variety of H.264 devices including set-top box decoders," says Casey Hall, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Extron. "We have expanded our support of encoding, network protocols, and control features in the SME 100 to give AV professionals a broader set of tools for AV streaming applications."

The SME 100 is available in two models, the SME 100 SD, which streams at resolutions from 166x120 up to 720x576, and the SME 100 HD, which streams at resolutions from 166x120 up to HDTV 1080p/30. Both models accept standard definition video and high definition video signals, including 1080p and computer-video signals up to 1920x1200 plus audio. Extron has developed the SME 100 feature set specifically to support the broad source, control, and processing capabilities that AV applications require.