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Meet Burplex. Our Automated Robot Machine. From a tiny Silicon Valley Tech Startup based in San Jose California, USA.
We use Burplex for thousands of comedy clips on BayStandup.com. However, Burplex is also good for churches, car dealerships and anyone who uses video in their business or organization. Photography is a compelling sales tool. Create your web channel or Roku channel in a snap. Store media streams on your own web server, or use the Amazon Elastic Cloud service. If you have the content, you could be publishing in a day or two. Burplex transcodes and distributes video in several formats at once, so you can support multiple bitrates and devices. With Burplex you can automatically title and watermark your company logo on the video streams. Post-production is the most expensive part of the video workflow. To reduce resource load and maximize productivity we analyzed our processes and identified routine and repetitive tasks which could be software automated. We developed our Burplex System in-house to solve our scheduling problem and greatly reduce production costs. Our software application system is based on the FreeBSD/Unix platform with coding in C/C++, PHP and Python and the PostgreSQL database server. We have developed a web based front-end administration tool which shows statistics and allows search and management of our media library content. Since we have developed our own systems in-house we are able to modify the code immediately to adapt to new requirements or realized performance enhancements, and quickly add new features. Because of the post-production costs at stake, we strive to record video clips which require no editing. At the end of each session we dump the cards to our Burplex servers, then log in the videos identifying performers and venues. From this point the system is fully automated. Videos are transcoded to WebM/vp8, and H.264 in several resolutions and frame rates, for various devices and clients including mobile phones, web browsers, flash player and the BayStandup.com Roku channel. The poster images and banners (at the bottom of the video) are automatically generated and watermarked on each frame of the video. Multiple servers process transcoding in parallel greatly reducing TTL. We may also select clips within our web interface to create and burn a DVD for duplication and distribution. (See DVD Samples below. Click thumbnail for larger preview image.) 
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*Burplex uses these technologies, however we do not intend to imply endorsement or certification by these companies. Logos and company names are the trademarks of the respective owners. |
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If further video editing is necessary, or clips need cut, merged sequences, etc, we use a source modified version of the Xine video player. Videos on the Burplex system can be played over the network on our client machines / notebook computers in the player. We have modified the source code and developed software on the servers so that editing commands perfomed on the client are transmitted to our Burplex servers over our TCP/IP network. The actual editing and transcoding is performed on the servers and not the client machines.
The user can also graphically select horizontal frame hinting to produce optimal thumbnail and poster images for the web site and Roku. Select the lead frame from any frame in your video, then select a centerpoint in that frame to create your vertical aspect poster for Roku. Burplex lets you title your poster frame. Below are some examples.
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Our web interface allows the user to visually select content for distribution and post to your own web servers or a cloud service. The resulting files can then be automatically uploaded to our live web servers for distribution via our streaming media server. Burplex also distributes media over Amazon EC2 Cloud / S3.
Media content is then automatically loaded into our ROKU channel where it is instantly available for viewing by subscribers.
Note: We are in the process of a complete overhaul of the Burplex web interface, and moving to a C++/fastcgi system running through lighttpd. The FreeBSD system is upgraded to 9.1R (world and kernel compiled with Clang).
Our Burplex system is based on a modified FreeBSD kernel and userland. Our media processing software is written in C++ with a PostgreSQL database backend and utilizes ffmpeg and the Boost libraries. The web interface is written in PHP and JavaScript w/jQuery, and uses the Apache httpd web server.
Below are some screenshots of the web-based interface we created for our Burplex System.
Contact Us For More Information
Information collected on this form shall be considered confidential and will not be shared with any third parties. After you fill in the form please press the SUBMIT button at the bottom of the form. Thank You! - the management
Free Download: Burplex Systems Qt4 Image Preview and Select
Qt4 application developed for photographers using FreeBSD Unix systems to quickly review and make selects. It was designed to be simple, clean and efficient with the goal of shortening the pre-production process time requirement. It utilizes DCRAW software to quickly extract the "thumbnail" JPEG image from RAW format files, which is much faster than rendering a RAW file. However, Burplex will display images stored in RAW, JPEG, or PPM format.
The photographer may browse their home directory and quickly review their images, marking selects or other purposes such as previewing images with a model, for example. Navigate the file tree view with your mouse, or up and down arrow keys, and toggle your selects using the "Insert" key.
Selects are stored in a plain text file which may be used for batch process scripting.
Example 1: (bash, copy to 'sav' directory)
# while read -r line; do cp $line sav/; done < ".selects"
Example 2: (bash, ImageMagick convert to resize)
# while read -r line; do convert -size 1200x1200 -scale 1200x1200 -density 120 -quality 90 $line sav/$line; done < ".selects"
FreeBSD Ports
The Burplex port is located in ports/graphics/burplex. It requires ports/devel/qt4 and ports/graphics/dcraw. (The Makefile will automatically check your system and build these if necessary).
You can also download the port here: http://www.burplex.com/burplex-port.tar.gz
SHA256 (burplex-port.tar.gz) = 22d95c39676e6f57bbfcfb686ec21dca39d97e3ec874dae9c099567ffcc08ec0, 1057 bytes, Sep 14 11:06
Source Download
Download the source code here: http://www.burplex.com/burplex-1.0.0.tar.gz
SHA256 (burplex-1.0.0.tar.gz) = f5c4c7ef578779ab1ea1caf1cf355a63490469765d4710feb1718e18538973e5, 105614 bytes, Sep 13 23:18
Build instructions (from Source, Requires Qt4)
lupdate-qt4 puf.pro lrelease-qt4 puf.pro qmake-qt4 make
Questions? Contact Waitman Gobble