Imagine this scenario: A rural doctor has to diagnose a critical patient in his ill-equipped chamber. He has a cheap PC webcam and an Internet connection at his disposal. He hooks up his webcam to record the patient’s video and streams it live to a group of specialists sitting at a TelePresence system in a remote city. As a result, the patient is quickly diagnosed and treated immediately.

Try another one: Some University students are busy in their internships, a few are unwell, and another handful didn’t make it to the class. The professor enables the e-learning system in class- his lecture is then converted from a format produced by the classroom camera to the format required by the students’ PC or mobile devices or the television set in the Hostel common room. Not only are the lectures transmitted live to the audience, two-way interaction is also possible in real time.

These scenarios above can be made possible by the Cisco Media Experience Engine 5600. The Cisco MXE 5600 is part of the media-processing product family that is designed to convert and enhance media so as to make it more productive and easier to use. Cisco MXE platforms transform live and on-demand media to be displayed on a vast range of devices and applications. Both video and audio are converted among different standards, and the video format can be changed to use an otherwise incompatible endpoint to view. Graphics and text overlays (like logos or titles) can be added to live video. Content can be customized with translations, file clipping, colour and video quality enhancements. In addition, spoken words can be converted into text that can be displayed as a closed caption or a transcript option on a video portal application. This media platform enables new functions for existing video applications such as the Cisco Digital Media Suite (DMS), Cisco TelePresence Systems, and Cisco Physical Security Systems.

In purely technical terms, the Cisco MXE 5600 is a media-processing platform that encompasses the capabilities of transcoders, media gateways and MCUs. The 8-slot chassis can support up to 30 full-duplex high-density video ports. These ports are embedded in a Media Processing Module (MPM) blade inside the chassis. Each MPM can support up to 15 video conferencing endpoints and the associated 15 Cisco TelePresence segments. Video conferencing endpoints all appear in a grid in one Cisco TelePresence screen with the earlier approach. But with Cisco 5600 interoperability solution, they appear in the Cisco TelePresence System full screen. Moreover, the Cisco MXE 5600 would allow customers to conduct TelePresence calls with others who are using video conferencing endpoints from vendors such as Polycom and Tandberg. In other words, the MXE platform would act as a video gateway between these video conferencing endpoints and the Cisco TelePresence system. This is quite a breakthrough, and should be a tremendous boost to promote standards-based interoperability.

To sum up, the new Cisco MXE 5600 is a quality networking solution that would facilitate highly improved audio-visual communication between business houses. Watch out for this product which is slated to begin shipping in the first half of 2010.

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