Russell Trafford-Jones, Author at The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: A Subjective Comparison of Broadcast and Unicast Transmission Impairments

Posted on 24th June 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Encoding at a high quality is only part of the equation for delivering a great experience to your viewers. When something goes wrong, the way viewers feel is just as important and then when it’s going right.

In this talk, Brahim Allan from British Telecom talks is through their experiment finding out how people felt about various different types of video impairment and the various sizes of screen now available on smart phones, tablets and, of course, TVs.

Brahim explains that they compared errors associated with broadcast and multicast delivery which appear as areas of extreme color or tearing of the image, with errors associated with Adaptive Bit Rate unicast, such as interruptions and quality variations. Interruptions were the most annoying impairment and interestingly young students have similar views to the adults.

Watch now for the full results!

Speakers

Brahim Allan
BT

Video: A Study of Protocols for Low Latency Video Transport Over the Internet

Posted on 21st June 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Contribution via the internet is tricky but has great promise. With packet loss and jitter all over the place, how can you deliver perfect video?

Ciro Noronha from Cobalt Digital explains the two ways people get around the unreliability of the internet: FEC and retransmission. Forward Error Correction uses some maths to transmit extra data on top of the stream which allows the receiver to correct for any packet losses. This method is standard in satellite transmission where it is always used to add robustness.

Retransmission is different in that it requires a return channel. When a receiver spots a missing packet, it asks for it to be resent. Being that it has to wait for a reply, retransmission protocols like SRT, ARQ and RIST run with a configurable buffer which needs to be big enough for at least one round trip. FEC schemes also require a buffer as it needs to wait for a number of packets before it can complete the maths required.

Ciro introduces FEC and ARQ before presenting work showing experiments he’s run on both FEC and ARQ to see the limits of their signal-correcting capabilities and latency. He finishes explaining what RIST is and its status.

Bring yourself up to date with RIST!
Watch now!

Speaker

Ciro Noronha
Director of Technology,
Cobalt Digital

Video: Reducing Stream Latency

Posted on 20th June 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Latency seems to be the new battleground for streaming services. While optimising bandwidth and quality are still highly important, they are becoming mature parts of the business of streaming whereas latency, and technologies to minimise it – as Apple showed this month – are still developing and vying for position.

Here, the Streaming Video Alliance brings together people from large streaming services to explore this topic finding out what they’ve been doing to reduce it, the problems they’ve faced and the solutions which are on the table.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Kevin Johns Distinguished Network Architect, Content and Media CenturyLink
	Chris Sammoury Principal Engineer II, Charter Communications
	Richard Oesterreicher CEO Streaming Global/Hellastorm
	Patrick Gendron Director, Innovation Harmonic
	Johan Bolin Chief Product and Technology Officer, Edgeware
	Steve Miller-Jones Vice President of Product Strategy, Limelight Networks
	Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Video Alliance

Video: Analysis of emerging video codecs: coding tools, compression efficiency and complexity

Posted on 19th June 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Delivering great quality, live video without breaking the bank is difficult. This talk looks at the different ways companies are dealing with this challenge.

NGCodec’s founder, Oliver Gunasekara, starts by quantifying the millions of dollars spent just by one company each year just on delivering their video and introduces the difficulties of CPU encoding compared to dedicated chips – ASICS and looks at how FPGAs fit in. Cloud-based FPGAs are available on AWS, Baidu, Alibaba and others.

After covering Twitch’s move to VP9 on FPGA, the talk finishes looking at on-premise implementation, Oliver looks at the cost of ownership of servers compared to Xilinx FPGA.

Speakers