Telestream Releases Switch

Telestream announced the release of Switch, a new multiformat media player that provides broadcast and post-production professionals everything they need to play, inspect, and correct their media in one, easy-to-use professional tool.

TelestreamSwitch is built on the same technologies Telestream developed for its professional transcoding tools, which power the digital media ecosystems of 95% of top US broadcasters, 80% of Fortune 100 companies in the US, thousands of media professionals, and literally millions of consumers.

Telestream is known for solving the challenges associated with creating and distributing media in today’s digital environment. As the number of resolutions, compression algorithms, and formats has increased, so has the need for tools to be able to open, play, inspect and correct the growing number of media files available. Media professionals today resort to using a collection of tools including players, inspectors, analyzers, and converters, to do their jobs. Switch brings all those tools together into a single, easy to use, software application.

“Telestream is in a unique position to leverage our decades of experience in developing media-centric products to design a powerful, and simple, tool,” said Barbara DeHart, vice president of desktop business at Telestream. “Switch gives anyone dealing with the production, distribution, or packaging of content everything they need to play it, check it and switch it.”

Play it
Switch supports high-quality playback for all major formats including MOV, MP4, MXF, GXF, MPEG-2 Program Streams and Transport Streams and more. The player includes standard navigation controls including fast forward, rewind, slow motion, as well as single-frame forward and back, for all file types.

Check it
Switch also displays all the relevant information about a media file. Video track display includes codec, bitrate, frame size, frame rate, interlacing format as well as aspect ratio and aperture information. The audio track inspector displays audio tracks and channels, speaker labels, and encoding format information.

Switch it
By switching to export mode users can modify settings and export a new file. Switch allows users to specify a new file format; a new video or audio codec; trim, scale or crop the video; add metadata, and insert chapter markers. A complete set of audio tools is available as well, to rearrange audio tracks and edit speaker assignments.

Switch also enables packaging and distribution of content to media platforms, such as iTunes. With Switch it is easy to create packages ready for distribution to the iTunes store. Users can verify file compatibility with iTunes store specifications and create an asset-only iTunes package – including the media content, secondary subtitle or audio files, chapter information, and an XML file.

“For professionals producing content for distribution to the iTunes store, Switch will save them a huge amount of time, and largely automates what today is mostly a manual process,” said DeHart.

Playback and basic inspection is available for free in Switch Player. Switch Pro ($295) adds additional format support, and the ability to export or change file properties. Switch is available for purchase from the Telestream website. Switch 1.0 is available for Mac, with support for Windows coming later in 2014.

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