City of Orem Now Communicates to Residents Using Matrox Monarch HD H.264

This user story from Matrox illustrates how powerful the Matrox Monarch HD H.264 encoding appliance is with its ability to both stream and record.

City of Orem Now Communicates to Residents Using Matrox Monarch HD H.264

Ever wondered if it’s ok to feed the squirrels that come out foraging after hibernation? Or use pesticides on the lawn? The City of Orem, Utah communicates its stand on such common and not so common issues through periodic council meetings and by-laws. Feeding wild animals, watering regulations, parking vehicles on the streets overnight, building permits, fencing restrictions, bringing pets to events, budgets and voting results; these are merely a few of the topics to which the City of Orem residents seek answers. The onus being on the residents to be aware of changing rules and by-laws, the city sought to find newer, better ways of communicating information to them. Before webcasting came into the picture, the residents needed to be physically present at council meetings to know and understand the outcomes. Now, they get the same information from the comfort of their homes. When the meeting timing is not convenient, residents are able to view the video on demand (VOD) version at their own leisure. Furthermore, live streams and VOD of internal committee meetings have brought greater transparency to the public. Steaming and recording are driven by the Matrox Monarch HD H.264 encoding appliance together with a real-time meeting manager application by Prime Government Solutions (PrimeGov), a world leader in legislative management software solutions. Monarch HD is used for live streaming videos of the council meetings and simultaneously recording them for later VOD use. PrimeGov lets the public search for an item of particular interest from the meeting agenda and view related video snippets. In addition, the application is also used to manage meeting minutes noted by the clerk, staff records, automated agendas, internal committee approvals and votes. Workflow At the council chambers in Orem, cameras capture and send HDMI feeds to the onsite Monarch HD device, which outputs RTMP streams compatible with many popular CDNs including YouTube and Ustream for video streaming over the internet. With the City of Orem benefitting from access to publically owned fibre network, the streaming is set at a higher than average bit rate of 12 Mbps with 720p resolution. Monarch HD is also set to record the meeting simultaneously to a USB drive with the same bit rate and resolution. In future, they propose to go for full 1080p resolution Blu-ray quality recording. With Monarch HD, the recording bit rate can be set even higher, independent from the streaming bit rate, with the combined bit rate as high as 30 Mbps. [Continue Reading...]