Why Choose a Software IP Codec for Online Streaming

Background

Within the broadcast engineering community, there's a tendency to think of hardware as more reliable than software. During the early days of the PC, this may have been true, but this suspicion isn't true today, and I'm going to explain why. I'll also explain some key advantages of software and why you should consider a software IP encoder instead of a hardware solution for streaming audio online.

Your PC is Hardware

For starters, it's important to remember that your PC is hardware - It's powerful, flexible, multi-purpose, upgradable hardware. PCs dominate the world of business computing because of these traits, and they're all useful advantages for radio stations too. Rather that investing in expensive, specialized IP codec hardware, you can buy an affordable desktop PC, a battery backup, and a software encoder like Rocket Broadcaster Pro, likely save money in the process too. The quality of electronic components in your average desktop PC is very high these days too, so you can expect a similar lifespan to dedicated encoder hardware.

Software is Upgradable and Interchangable, and your Encoder should be too

One of the key benefits of software is that it's upgradable, which is essential for a streaming audio IP codec, since it needs to interoperate with an ecosystem of other software. For example, your IP codec needs to connect to a streaming audio server like Icecast, and receive metadata from your radio automation software. Each piece of this ecosystem is a moving target - Radio automation systems get upgraded, and streaming services adopt new features, so your encoder needs to be able to keep up with the ecosystem. With a software IP codec, it's easy to upgrade to a newer version to stay compatible with these other applications in the ecosystem, or to take advantage of new features.

Software is also easier for developers to produce upgrades for than hardware, which is why you're more likely to get upgrades, and get them faster. (How many firmware updates do you see for your average hardware device? By comparison, Rocket Broadcaster has had more than 80 updates so far.) On more than a dozen occassions, we've turned around a bugfix or new feature for a customer in under 24 hours.

Another reason to upgrade your streaming encoder is that even established audio compression codecs do change and improve, and you'll want to be able to take advantage of that. For example, the Fraunhofer AAC+ encoder used by Rocket Broadcaster Pro has received a number of updates over the years to improve perceived audio quality for certain bitrates and audio profiles. On the other hand, if you're using a hardware IP codec with dedicated chip for encoding, it can't be updated, so you're stuck.

Lastly, with a software IP codec running on a PC, you're never locked-in. If your streaming requirements change over time, you're always free to switch to a different software encoder without throwing away your whole hardware investment.

Forget the Myths - Good Software is Stable

The tools that software developers use today to help them produce stable software are lightyears beyond what we was availabe 20 years ago. As a result, stable software is much easier to produce, and far less prone to issues that were more common in the early 1990s. We have tools to detect and prevent crashes and memory leaks, and these help us ensure Rocket Broadcaster is rock solid.

Better yet, you don't have to take our word for it - you can easily check this for yourself. By using Windows Task Manager, you can check the memory usage of Rocket Broadcaster over a couple of days and see for yourself that it doesn't leak memory. You can't do that with hardware encoder.

Hardware's Dirty Little Secrets

So far, we've covered that software IP codecs are superior to hardware because they're upgradable, interchangeable, free of vendor lock-in, and stable.

This next part might surprise you then: Most "hardware" IP codec boxes are running embedded Linux and a software encoder.

That's right - Your "hardware" encoder is still software, but because the software is part of a firmware, it's difficult and expensive to update. It loses out on all of the advantages that a PC-based encoder like Rocket Broadcaster Pro has.

To demonstrate our point, we compared Rocket Broadcaster Pro on Windows 10 to one of the leading hardware IP codec boxes, which shall remain nameless:

Why do security updates matter? Because embedded hardware can have security problems too. If the corporate behemoth that is Cisco Systems can't make a secure router and needs to produce security updates, odds are your hardware encoder made by a much smaller company will need security updates too. (Remember, it's likely running an entire Linux operating system. Is it getting security updates? Probably not.)

With Rocket Broadcaster Pro running on Windows 10, you're assured that Microsoft is providing security updates for your OS, and they're getting automatically applied for you. And as a software vendor, we track security issues ourselves and ensure to release security updates when needed. With embedded hardware, odds are if you're not applying firmware updates, your device is never receiving security updates, and could be a ticking timebomb.

Lastly, specialized hardware can come with its own set of problems. Electrical circuits and chips can and do have bugs. Have you tested your hardware encoder during a brown out? Do you know how your hardware will behave during a power supply failure? How will the encoder behave during a prolonged period of packet loss? At least with PC, you're better equipped to test your setup under various conditions, and better equipped to troubleshoot any problems that arise.

Summary

In this article, we've argued that a PC is the best hardware you can get, and combined with Rocket Broadcaster Pro, makes for an reliable, cost-effective IP codec solution for online radio streaming. We hope you consider Rocket as your next streaming audio encoder.