How does Giraffe Work?

For a working demo, please see the fully functional demonstration at reel.tv

Giraffe is an integrated system of hardware and software that allows digital audio and video to be hosted, managed and delivered to a player application that can be easily sent electonically or placed into a website. The player application is the most important element and the first thing produced for you.

While the player is one of the core elements of the system, the other is the software we run on the Giraffe servers to bring your media and data together to be sent to the player.

There are actually many ways to use Giraffe and we'd be happy to discuss how best to implement the system for your needs.

However you choose to use it, working with the system breaks down to three easy steps…

The first step is to convert your media into a format that your player can understand and display, this process is called 'encoding'. For best results you will need a good encoding tool, but we can advise you which is the best one for you, depending on your media, technical experience and budget.

We can supply you with our unique settings for most of the commercial encoding tools: Telestream's Episode, Sorenson Squeeze, Apple's Compressor or even QuickTime Pro.

As part of the encoding process, the video is compressed to a file size many times smaller than the original, so once it's ready it can be easily transferred by FTP to your account on the Giraffe server or your own hosting.

Giraffe Reel manager controls the content of each player's menu, to add or delete items or even disable a player.

The moment you publish your player changes, those changes are live and will be visible when the player is next opened. Our central Giraffe servers look at these files to check for changes, so you can always be sure that people are seeing your latest version.

Once the media has been uploaded using the Giraffe extranet and has been added to your player, you're ready to go!

See 'Player Delivery' for more information on how to get your player out to your clients and users.

All sounds a bit much for me!

Don't worry, it takes only 15 minutes to be familiar with Giraffe. We're happy to provide training and support in any way we can to make sure you get the best from the system. We can also look after the whole thing for you, taking care of setting up your players, encoding and management. All you need to do then is provide us with your media and information and we do the rest. For our international clients, training can be done using our remote eSupport system.

The Giraffe system has ultimately been designed to be simple to use for everyone, whether you're the recipient of a player or the person publishing content to it.