This is the H.264 variant of our MM-1288S2 MPEG-2 standard definition multicast encoder blade. (H.264 is also known as AVC or MPEG-4 part 10.) It offers approximately 2× bandwidth savings for a given quality level by comparison with the MPEG-2 variant. The blade accepts standard definition analog video and audio, converts it to a single-program MPEG-2 transport stream (MP2TS) containing H.264 video, and streams it out the Ethernet port. It uses either raw UDP or RTP encapsulation, and can stream to a unicast or multicast addresses or accept unicast video-on-demand requests. Various hardware decoders and PC software programs can accept these streams, allowing many possible configurations. The multicast option makes this device especially useful for streaming video from any source that will be used simultaneously by many users. For example, cable channels or local-origination video cameras.