We currently use a Digital Rapids Stream-Z HD for transcoding, and we constantly have to reboot the device to get it to work.
We use Squeeze for smaller projects, but our church services go through the StreamZ because it uses proprietary hardware to generate everything faster and supposedly higher quality.
We mainly push out multi-stream HLS (I believe 4 streams) and audio-only.
I’d love to replace the Stream-Z this year with something more stable, what are you guys using?
About a year ago we bought a year and a half ago we bought a lightspeed server from telestream and so far our production guys have been very very happy with it
Also push out a 4 stream multi bitrate HLS at https://willowcreek.tv. I don’t recall them ever having to reboot or troubleshoot the actual device. The only hiccups we’ve had have been on our side. These guys also have proprietary software and hardware, they actually use GPU’s to do all the workload. We have a pretty good deadline after our final server to edit and encode so its on the website by Sunday afternoon and this has always done the job
One feature we havent taken advantage of but Ive heard about in the sales pitch was that you can buy 2 or more of these and link them all together to make a transcoding farm and the software will automatically push the video file to the server with the less load. Pretty neat! Let me know if you want some more information!