Background: Deutsche Welle (DW) produces radio and television programmes that are not only broadcast in Germany but worldwide – in German and in many other languages. To allow the Internet editors to embed the Deutsche Welle radio reports in various languages on its website, they must be processed accordingly.
The task: To make specific DW programmes continuously available in different languages in the Internet, recordings must be made automatically from eight audio signals and converted into streaming formats. Furthermore, the editors require free access to the material of the last 48 hours to produce retrospective segments.
In addition to the streaming formats, metadata, such as the series and programme title, or language, is to be processed in different languages, which can also be forwarded.
Our solution: We programmed two servers so that they continuously and redundantly record eight AES/EBU signals in short blocks. The blocks are buffered and transmitted to a central server that stores them for 48 hours. The servers also performs the following tasks:
• Web interface hosting for operation and administration
• Seamless concatenation of the audio blocks for further processing
• Distribution of the transcoding jobs to several servers
• Generation of metadata
• Transmission of metadata and media data to different servers
• Monitoring of all processes
An integrated transcoding farm converts the recordings into the desired target formats. Real, MP3, and Windows Media, as well as 3GPP, Flash, or AAC formats are available.
Overview of our services:
• Development of the entire application,
• Provision, configuration, and maintenance of the required hardware.