What are /r/broadcastengineering's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

It's actually the unreal engine run through the Ross Frontier system. They did the big tornado thing in the set last April as their big launch with it and the Future Group. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/the-future-group-and-the-weather-channel-create-lightning-and-tornadoes-with-unreal-engine

RTMP to SDI decoder box? You need one for each stream. There must be similar appliances that do multiple channels in one box too.

https://www.amazon.com/decoder-Broadcasting-Equipment-Streaming-Decoder/dp/B07V2DHNM9

That kit will work fine. I've always found those LEMO tools to be pretty annoying. What i do 90% of the time is just wet one of these with some iso and stick it where the fiber line is and give it a few turns and call it a day.

I want to add to the already good answers here by pointing out a few scenarios that I've seen.

1) The web service may have a terrestrial broadcast partner, or may have partnered with an established network to produce the content in question. In that scenario they may transmit via satellite back to that partner facility in order to establish link, and the network HQ can provide contribution to the web services.

2) In most established US sporting venues there is a large quantity of bandwidth available from various providers. There are multiple vendors with redundant 10gig trunks into the venue, there is a push in some scenarios to upgrade those links to 100G. With appropriate bandwidth to a collocated datacenter at each venue its fairly simple to contribute directly to the web processing stack and CDN Networks with a low compression algorithm such as JPEG 2000, or JPEG XS. Even at 200-500meg/stream there is plenty of bandwidth available to support that level of IP transport.

3) On the low end, I've watched someone with a pair of gaming laptops and$150 Blackmagic Converters walk onto the truck and stream out to YouTube over the public internet.

In another comment you are surprised at the cost of a set of professional encoders. The $2000/channel price point is on the low end of professional encoding hardware. Remember there's a big difference between consumer and professional gear. In the professional space, I need this hardware to function 24/7/365 flawlessly, and the market is pretty small.
Go ahead and google Contribution Encoding Platform and you'll get a sense of the players involved in the product space for this.

I’m interested in this, too, though some of the comments confuse me, as they’re talking about software-only solutions (restream.io and vMix), and your post was asking about hardware devices. I‘d love clarity on that topic as I may be missing something and this interests me.

What about using Blackmagic ATEM Mini Pro? At $495, it’s competitive to the Web Presenter, but does lack a screen for preview (and SDI; you can HDMI in or use a Mini Converter, though now your price is topping that of the Web Presenter). That said, it offers the same H.264 hardware encoding and livestream capabilities as the Web Presenter, or you could output as a RTMP stream and then feed out to restream.io or your preferred destination.

One I forgot: http://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit (on mobile, bad formatting, sorry)

I often get various subtitle files that our translators need to have converted to the .PAC format that we use and this program usually does the trick.

Something else worth mentioning is that troubleshooting skills are a must if you end up as a maintenance or design engineer. That starts with understanding signal flow in a system. Then you make determinations as to where you might try and look for problems in a given system.

Beyond that, I would say I learned a lot from audio engineering studies. There are tons of good books in the audio engineering realm that talk about signal flow, how jackfields work, common mode noise rejection, and things like sample rate and audio digitization. All those fundamentals are really important.

This book looks good: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Recording-Applications-Francis-Rumsey/dp/0415843375/

I don't have all the books I used handy but I'll try and dig them up.

https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Television-Fundamentals-Michael-Robin/dp/0071355812

Boss had me study this book. Helped a lot if you already have an idea of how things work.

Be warned its a slow burn.

Your coding will definitely help a lot more in this new age though. Although the broadcast team I worked with mostly used third party systems so it was more being on the phone with tech support than anything else.

I purchased some secondhand Henry Engineering gear in hopes of setting up monitoring and talkback for our podcasting studio. The ins/outs require what the manual calls "euroblock connectors".

I bought these: https://www.amazon.com/Hosa-PHX-206FBULK-6-Inch-Adaptor-PHX3F/dp/B003D83OWC

...but the terminal end is too big and the wrong shape. If I google "euroblock connector", that term seems to refer to all different kinds of connector. I've tried emailing Henry Engineering about this, but they haven't gotten back to me. Does anyone happen to know what kind of euroblock connectors these are so I can figure out what to order from mouser or digikey?