• Broadcasting

  Fibre Channel

  Posted by Ryan Loetscher on August 12, 2010 at 10:58 pm

  Hopefully I’m in the right place… I couldn’t really see where else to post this question.

  I do production for a company that provides closed circuit programming to hospitals. We have a server unit that provides most of these hospitals our channel, sometimes its through VOD… but there’s always that one that wants to do something different. We have a hospital that wants to send our channel from their main building, to a subsidiary, via a fibre channel line. They wanted to know if they could do that without eating up all their bandwidth since its the same line they use for their intranet. Since our files are at max 5mbs H.264 files, my first reaction was that they don’t even have to worry. But, for some reason our sales executive seems to recall that other clients in the same situation thought it would take up too much… and I guess the hospital asked how many “strands” of fibre channel it would take up and what hardware they would need to play it on one side and receive it on the other.

  This is not an area I am an expert in, but as I understand it, this should barely take up any space on a single fibre channel line. As for what they need to play it from one location to another, I’m not sure. Can anyone start pointing me in the right directions?

  Bob Zelin replied 15 years, 9 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Bob Zelin

  August 13, 2010 at 3:22 am

  please excuse my ignorance –
  do you want to send an h.264 stream from one building to another, or do you want to send a baseband video signal of your channel (with embedded audio) from one building to another.

  If you want to send baseband video, and encode and decode it into a fibre cable for a long run, both Blackmagic and AJA (which have COW forums) make wonderful inexpensive SDI to fibre encoders and decoders. The expensive part will be running a single LC fibre cable between the two buildings. As for running h.264 – if it is already native h.264, all you need is two simple ethernet switches with SFP link ports on them (one per building) – you put transceivers (Finisar, for example) into each SFP port, and run a single LC fibre cable, and you are done.

  Everyone makes this into brain surgery. The only brain surgery is how do you get the dedicated fibre cable from one building to the other.

  Bob Zelin

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up