12/12/2008 -- Cisco Systems Inc. this week unveiled a new digital media platform, comprising both hardware and software deliverables, which it says facilitates live and on-demand media access from PCs, cellular phones and other mobile devices.

Cisco's new Media Processing platform boasts "create once and share anywhere" technology that, officials say, is able to reformat video on-the-fly for viewing on virtually any device.

The first Cisco Media Processing deliverable is the new Media Experience Engine (MXE) 3000, a standalone 1RU device that, natch, can transform a content source such that it's playable on any device.

The MXE 3000 also bundles post processing features such as watermarking and noise reduction and post-production tools for voice and video editing. It supports a dizzying array of media formats and production environments, including all current flavors of Windows Media (versions 7, 8 and 9) and Windows Media Audio; current RealVideo and RealAudio formats; all supported QuickTime codecs; several MPEG4 flavors; Flash video technologies; MP3; and the WAV format. On the production environment tip, the MXE 3000 can consume output from Avid, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Premiere (AVI). It also supports Windows DirectShow filters and QuickTime APIs, among others.

Elsewhere, the MXE 3000 performs on-the-fly encoding (and post-processing) of computationally-intensive H.264 content.

It addresses a fast emerging market segment, Cisco officials maintain.

"The proliferation of video as a communications and collaboration medium continues to drive new business models for our customers," said Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco's Emerging Technologies group, in a statement. "As businesses look for ways to do more with less, video has emerged as the technology that can make a significant impact in the way we interact and manage." Cisco's Media Processing platform addresses a need for what officials dub "medianet" technologies: a new class of devices that support the rapid delivery of rich media content -- and which simplify the issue of media sharing -- across heterogeneous networks and to heterogeneous devices.

"Media Processing embodies the fabric of medianet and will enable a range of new experiences on Cisco medianets, including language translation for live and on-demand video, speech recognition that will make video searchable and the transformation of video to make it available to all connected devices with displays," De Beer concluded. --Stephen Swoyer