Just a few years ago, recording and broadcasting products were new stuff in China and users then hesitated in building recording and broadcasting classrooms. Schools usually set up no more than three classrooms and assigned technicians to manage and maintain the equipments, which was far way from meeting the demands of on-line learning resource construction. However, the massive construction of recording and broadcasting classrooms were faced by challenges of high cost and inadequate technician resource. To address the problems, PowerCreator spent three years doing research and released Media Center in 2007 as the first provider of such system in China. Users may install the system and construct on-line learning resource widely with lower cost and fewer technicians.

Media Center system is comprised of front-end and back-end. The front-end is responsible for collecting, coding and transmitting audio, video, and VGA signals and installed in classrooms, while the back-end is for classroom monitoring, class recording and controlling and installed in the controlling room. The two ends are connected through the local area network (or Internet).

Media Center has realized the function of digital video surveillance. Users can monitor each classroom from the control room and control P/T/Z. Media Center can also build video wall, saving the investment of equipments for traditional monitoring systems such as video decoder, video multiplexer, and PC-DVR.

Apart from the video surveillance function, Media Center enables remote screen monitoring. The control room can see and operate on the computer screen of each classroom, even the small words can be seen very clearly.

Media Center can be installed according to users’ existing equipment and budget. The installation plans for the front-end are as follows:

     Plan A: one video capture card & PowerCreator Composers on front-end computer.
     Plan B: one video server (also known as network camera or IP Camera) in the classroom;
     Plan C: one VGA encoder or PowerCreator Teacher software in the classroom.

Each server with Media Center can simultaneously record several classrooms. Taking double-Xeon 5405 for example, with the video size of 320x240, frame rate of 25fps and bit stream of 512Kbps, it can record 32 classrooms at the same time. The average hardware investment of each classroom is no more than RMB5,000, which shows that the system has a very high cost performance.