VBrick Case Study
THE CLIENT
VBrick Systems is the world leader in live, online video solutions. Offering a comprehensive suite of enterprise video products, VBrick provides business and organizations with robust and proven online video systems that connect people everywhere. VBrick's core product offering is the networked video appliance, which enables customers to capture and deliver live streaming video over any network. Additional VBrick components and management software round out a complete video delivery system that can capture, record, manage and distribute video across the enterprise.
THE CHALLENGE
VBrick Systems needed a cross-platform video decoder—specifically, one that could run as a browser plugin on Linux and Macintosh OS/X—to complete its end-to-end solution. Cardinal Peak delivered a decoder that can receive H.264, MPEG-4 part 2, Windows Media, MPEG-2 and MPEG-1 over the network, extract closed captioning information, and display the resulting video with low CPU impact.
THE SOLUTION
"Cardinal Peak was a natural choice for us," said Bruce Webber, VBrick's VP of Software Engineering. "They were able to develop a high-quality product, based in part on open source and in part on intellectual property they had already developed, all for a very effective price."
"Working with VBrick is a pleasure," said Howdy Pierce, Managing Partner of Cardinal Peak. "They are uncompromising with respect to the quality of the finished product. A browser plugin for VBrick is effectively embedded code—it's got to be able to run continuously for long periods of time."
The Nutcracker browser plugin that Cardinal Peak delivered to VBrick is based on a modular, object-oriented design. Each processing step, from stream demultiplexing to audio and video decoding, is performed in its own thread, and individual processing threads are connected by software queues or FIFOs. Where appropriate, open source libraries were used to speed time-to-market and keep costs down. Because 95 percent of the code is shared between the different browsers and operating systems, the testing and bug-fixing effort is also highly efficient; testing on one platform provides a reasonable coverage of the overall codebase.
RESULTS
By using Cardinal Peak, VBrick has been able to add to its product line and provide a complete cross-platform solution, without defocusing its engineering team or overtaxing management bandwidth. More importantly, the company was able to achieve that result in an extremely cost-effective manner. For substantially less than the cost of one engineer per year, VBrick is able to tap into deep expertise in a flexible manner that allows manpower to scale as required.
"I basically think of Cardinal Peak as an extension of my own team," said Webber. "I have an extremely high degree of confidence in their ability to deliver what they say they are going to deliver. They work well with our own people and they're seen as a real positive by others in our company."
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"Cardinal Peak was a natural choice for us. They were able to develop a high-quality product, based in part on open source and in part on intellectual property they had already developed, all for a very effective price."
Bruce Webber, VP of Software Engineering, VBrick
