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You can get a couple of VBricks. The MPEG4 models are what you want. They have a videoconferencing mode which is low delay.

We use them specifically to do what you're describing to do some surgical training. One box in the OR, another in a conference room attached to a projector. They even support a really nice echo canceling microphone, which normalizes audio levels no matter how far the people are from the mic.

The vbricks also have scripting, support SNMP puts and contact relays. So there are a number of different ways you could have non-technical people control the conference, if you didn't want it running 24/7.

You could buy the model with the internal hard drive, and have a big red button to start/stop recording the whole conference.

Best of all, they run a hardened RTOS. No patching the OS, updating virus software or whatever. It'll take under an hour to setup, including opening the box, and you won't have to worry about the things ever again.

Sounds to me like all you need is a scheduler (easy enough to write) that feeds an MPEG stream to whatever device you're using to drive the broadcast signal. How hard is that? How are you converting your MPEG stream to NTSC? I've done basically the same thing for these, although that won't help you as they're basically just streamers that work with a corresponding player on somebody's PC. But I did whip it up in just a couple of hours, so hopefully your solution won't take much longer.

Or is that your question, what kind of hardware should you be looking at? If so, sorry, the phrase "need the equivalent of iTunes for high-quality video" threw me off. I'm sure you can Google just as well (or in this case, probably better) than I can...

There are two devices I recommend for this: The first one is the Edje series encoders, made by http://www.adtecinc.com/Adtec. They offer good quality, and use MPEG-2 streams. If you're going the cheap route, I believe it's under $500 these days. The second is the http://www.vbrick.com/VBrick series of streaming encoders. I've only tested their MPEG2 models, but they have a wide range of MPEG4 available as well. These can also record locally to a HD. They're a bit more expensive than the Adtecs, but quite reliable. While I wouldn't really call either of these machines "open" per se, I am under the impression they both use linux kernels under the hood. They can be controlled either by RS-232 or ethernet with their simple client software (Adtec lets you play directly with the settings in a terminal too.) VBricks also include a remote control. Hope this helps.

Check out VBrick Systems. They make some cool encoders, some with built-in hard drives for recording. They also have software that can record from these streams (but it runs on Windoze - the actual "bricks" run a Unix-based embedded OS).

And the only person who's actually cited badmouthing the VC-1 codec is the head of Vbrick. Let's see what Vbrick is financially inolved with. Why, it's H.264. (scroll down toward the bottom)

I'm not saying that he's wrong or right, but *everyone* involved in this "who's better" fight has heavy financial incentive to say the other is bad.

You know, people that prefer to use an external bus rather than pop their case -- that's no big deal to me. In fact the trend might be a good thing overall, as it might result in a much more modular architecture in the long run. (Imagine PCI-Express being used the way firewire and friends are, then imagine your noisy drives tucked downstairs in the basement and your sound inputs safely far away from electromagnetic interference from the rest of the PC.)

What bothers me is the way USB was crammed down the throat of the consumer, when there was already a electrical line-coding standard for transmission at those speeds, over standard twisted pair cable, with plugs anyone with a pair of $45 crimpers can make, and which can run up to 300 feet. It's called 4B/5B NRZ. Moreover, there was already a cheap, readily available source of chipsets and in fact entire device suites for this standard. You may know it as "Fast Ethernet".

But, instead of making a new industry standard frame protocol for isocronous use of fast ethernet, these corporate shylocks decided that they didn't want Joe user to be able to buy an off-the-shelf ethernet cable, minihub, and extra PC ethernet card to plug his devices in. They wanted the only cables, hubs, and PC-cards sold for this use to be sold by people who had payed them license fees. God forbid, that might even allow Joe user to decide whether to use his port as ethernet or as an isocronous-io port. Or they might let Joe user run his cables more than 20 feet away from his PC without buying a "certified" extension cable. We wouldn't want to offer THAT level of choice, flexibility and simplicity to the end user, would we now?

So, a while ago I decided that I was going to fork over as little money as possible to the purveyors of the "Unnecessary Standards Base." I won't be buying one of these anytime soon, though it would be really nice to move that noisy media-pc of mine away from my entertainment system. Now if ATI can offer a $99 solution that streams using ethernet without stepping on the toes of pro-av vendors like these guys and getting themselves sued, then they may have a sale or three to me in their future.

How long until they get sued by these guys:
VBrick Systems

Seems like it's essentially doing the same thing and, to me, the name seems awfully similar...