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August 9, 2008

The MontaVista Linux Professional Edition has been used by RipCode for more than three years now.

It's a platform designed for video developers who want all the benefits of an open source development environment, and that will seemlessly integrate with any Linux kernel.

RipCode, a privately held company that was founded three years ago, not only was operating on a six-month deadline to develop and deliver its RipCode V-4 video transcoding device, but also was focusing on securing funding as well. That in itself can be quite a feat some will say.

RipCode open source developer Cuong Nguyen says "at the very first phase, we had four people building the original prototype. There was no way we could do a GUI if we didn't leverage a lot of existing software. We essentially were building a hardware product for transcoding video."

By leveraging MontaVista Software's Linux technology, RipCode was able to bring RipCode V-4 -- designed to process the highest volume of Internet-based video formats available in a single rack-unit chassis -- to market much sooner than it otherwise would have been able to.

While Nguyen says the original project has been a real success, he does acknowledge that RipCode developers faced many challenges. One of them was insistence on selecting a stable version of MontaVista Linux.

Nguyen said "overall, we needed remote control software and business logic to properly manage the platform. We wanted to spend the majority of our time on the control effort, using an operating system that is easily embedded. So to get all of that running properly, we considered VxWorks."

"We only considered Linux. One of our engineers had prior experience with MontaVista. So that was the real reason we chose it. We tried to build our own distribution, and that meant we needed to get the driver for the board. It just so happened that MontaVista already had that," said Nguyen.

In terms of how things are going since the decision to use MontaVista Linux, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak... In September 2007, the company scored a major victory when it announced that MySpaceTV had successfully wrapped up a trial of the RipCode V-4 application.

The trial, said RipCode in a news release, made MySpaceTV the largest video Internet site to address the growing volume of video transcodes using an appliance- based solution.

Nguyen added "we chose a stable version of the solution, but we chose it right at the cutoff version, so we didn't have the advantage of some of the upgrades. There are releases constantly, and if you want a stable product you simply can't chase upgrades all the time."

RipCode has previously disclosed that using MontaVista Linux as opposed to trying to reinvent the proverbial wheel likely saved it between $4 and $5 million in both time and resources during the development of the device. Nguyen, however, looks at things from the familiarity perspective rather than the dollars-and-cents perspective.

He said "in the beginning, we actually discovered kernel bugs and overloading the system. We had to rewrite some of the Linux drivers when we did a kernel upgrade. And now we have strategies to do it better in the future. In some sense, if we had chosen Free BSD, which doesn't change that often, that could have been a possible choice. Even now, we are still exposing some kernel bugs that are difficult. A real-time environment that stresses the system shows the bugs."

Nguyen, who says that RipCode is now working on the second release of its product, insists that startups facing issues similar to the ones that RipCode faced three years ago would benefit from building on a proven platform to get products to market sooner.

"I've worked in Linux my entire career, and a lot of us are like that. So when we chose Linux the comfort level was already there right from the start. We also know the packages we can use on the system. So it allowed us to provide a base very quickly, and then we could build business logic on top of that. We can have a small development team and we could do a lot more work."

Source: RipCode Inc.

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