Giving consumers ever more digital TV channels and interactive services puts increasing pressure on operators to monitor broadcast streams. Disruptions within the transport stream can affect the quality of service delivered to the viewer, reducing consumer confidence. Any problems need to be analysed so they can be avoided in the future.

Capture the stream
Most monitoring solutions only detect problems during broadcast. However, sometimes problems can be too complex or irregular to be analysed properly on-line. CAPTIS is a reliable continuous recording platform that monitors and captures all your transport stream data during the complete processing path (downlink, ingest, encoding, multiplexing, etc.) as they pass through the digital headend. You can use it to monitor an entire pipeline or several outgoing transport streams, or to record information for playback later allowing you to perform off-line stream analysis, after the event.

Continuous recording with flexibility
As well as providing reliable, continuous recording, the CAPTIS platform is highly adaptable, both in number of recorded transport streams and in size of recording window. This gives you ample opportunity to retrieve recorded segments for post-analysis – hours or even days after the actual broadcast. You can then use CAPTIS to export them to various media, including DVD / BD, local network and the internet, for off-line analysis with any MPEG / DVB transport stream analyzer.

Key benefits

• High performance capture implementation ensures storage of every single bit
• Provides instant access to recorded content due to accurate time stamping of recordings
• Scalable – add more CAPTIS systems to increase the number of recorded transport streams
• A cluster of CAPTIS machines can be monitored remotely from a single management console
• No hardware requirements – a complete ‘system in a box’

CAPTIS key features

• DVB ASI/IP compliant transport stream recorder
• Records up to 5 transport streams per (3U-5U) device
• Expands recording window by up to 2 months
• Supports bit rates up to 55 Mbit/s per transport stream
• IP streaming support for both recording engine and player
• Dynamic recording space partitioning: cyclic recording of one channel for 2 days, then another for 5 days
• Content copying based on EIT present / following: select an event and it is copied to off-line storage
• On screen playback of unscrambled content
• Dynamic triggering of off-line recording of incidents (requires SPECTRIS)

The easy-to-use CAPTIS application suite offers:

• Capture process monitoring and management on a cluster of CAPTIS machines
• Copying of recordings to an off-line hard disk or network driveplus built-in DVD / BD burner application
• Built-in playback of transport streams via output ports
• Scheduled back-ups to off-line storage

Captured in timeline fashion
CAPTIS monitors the capture process (e.g. current input bit rate and disk usage) on all inputs across all systems. For each input the captured data is clearly displayed as a timeline, divided up into minutes. Moving your mouse over a timeline will show the actual captured services at any particular moment and, if configured, even the current event for each service.

Copying content to permanent storage is easy – simply select the required part of the timeline and choose where to store it. CAPTIS converts the internal recording format to transport stream files and stores them on the built-in long term storage disk(s), ready for off-line analysis. And with the integrated DVD / BD burning application, you can also put these files onto a DVD / BD for easy distribution. The integrated TS player lets you output recorded files via the ASI port to any analyzer for further investigation. Finally, the scheduled copy task wizard facilitates copying recordings to permanent storage on a regular basis.