The VBrick DME is a multi-faceted platform that performs a variety of serving, reflecting, and transmuxing, and transrating activities and is comprised of the major components shown in the DME Components topic.

In a typical application, a DME receives a unicast stream over the WAN link (often over TCP) to effectively traverse the LAN and pass through firewalls. The DME then streams via unicast and/or multicast to a variety of different clients in the streaming protocol of choice for each client.

To conserve bandwidth, reflectors can be linked across the WAN to relay video streams from one remote site to multiple downstream DME reflectors. The net effect is that a single unicast stream across the WAN can reach tens of thousands of viewers. To improve reliability, reflectors can either pull or push streams across the WAN using TCP. If a network outage occurs, the DMEs will automatically reconnect and resume streaming without any user intervention.

To reach different classes of clients (e.g. PCs, STBs, and mobile devices), a single stream of H.264‑encoded multi-bitrate (MBR) video can work in concert with reflectors to distribute streams in the most efficient manner. Reflectors can also transmux video streams, converting from one type of transport stream on the input to another type of transport on the output. In transmuxing, a digital bit stream is converted from one file format or streaming protocol to another—without changing the compression method.

An example of transmuxing is when a unicast stream is converted to multicast or when an RTP stream is converted to RTMP. H.264 offers a variety of transport protocols to ensure the reliable delivery of video over a variety of networks.

For live broadcasts, the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) is efficient, while the Real-time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) offers the player controls (fast forward, rewind) needed for VOD playback. Newer transport protocols like RTMP (for Flash) and HTTP are optimized for Internet clients and mobile devices.