Russell Trafford-Jones, Author at The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Building Large SMPTE ST 2110 Systems Using JT-NM TR-1001-1

Posted on 12th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

With the SMPTE 2110 suite of standards largely published and the related AMWA IS-04 and -05 specifications stable, people’s minds are turning to how to implement all these standards bringing them together into a complete working system.

The JT-NM TR-1001-1 is a technical recommendation document which describes a way of documenting how the system will work – for instance how do new devices on the network start up? How do they know what PTP domain is in use on the network?

John Mailhot starts by giving an overview of the standards and documents available, showing which ones are published and which are still in progress. He then looks at each of them in turn to summarise its use on the network and how it fits in to the system as a whole.

Once the groundwork is laid, we see how the JT-NM working group have looked at 5 major behaviours and what they have recommended for making them work in a scalable way. These cover things like DNS discovery, automated multicast address allocation and other considerations.

Watch now

Speaker

John Mailhot
CTO Networking & Infrastructure
Imagine Communications

Video: Per-title Encoding at Scale

Posted on 11th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

MUX is a very pro-active company pushing forward streaming technology. At NAB 2019 they have announced Audience Adaptive Encoding which is offers encodes tailored to both your content but also the typical bitrate of your viewing demographic. Underpinning this technology is machine learning and their Per-title encoding technology which was released last year.

This talk with Nick Chadwick looks at what per-title encoding is, how you can work out which resolutions and bitrates to encode at and how to deliver this as a useful product.

Nick takes some time to explain MUX’s ‘convex hulls’ which give a shape to the content’s performance at different bitrates and helps visualise the optimum encoding parameters the content. Moreover we see that using this technique, we see some surprising circumstances when it makes sense to start at high resolutions, even for low bitrates.

Looking then at how to actually work out on a title-by-title basis, Nick explains the pros and cons of the different approaches going on to explain how MUX used machine learning to generate the model they created to make this work.

Finishing off with an extensive Q&A, this talk is a great overview on how to pick great encoding parameters, manually or otherwise.

Watch now!

Speaker

Nick Chadwick
Software Engineer,
Mux Inc.

Video: Into the Depths: The Technical Details behind AV1

Posted on 10th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

As we wait for the dust to settle on this NAB’s AV1 announcements hearing who’s added support for AV1 and what innovations have come because of it, we know that the feature set is frozen and that some companies will be using it. So here’s a chance to go in to some of the detail.

AV1 is being created by the AOM, the Alliance for Open Media, of which Mozilla is a founding member. The IETF is considering it for standardisation under their NetVC working group and implementations have started. On The Broadcast Knowledge, we have seen explanations from Xiph.org, one of the original contributors to AV1. We’ve seen how it fares against HEVC with Ian Trow and how HDR can be incorporated in it from Google and Warwick University. For a complete list of all AV1 content, have a look here.

Now, we join Nathan Egge who talks us through many of the different tools within AV1 including one which often captures the imagination of people; AV1’s ability to remove film grain ahead of encoding and then add back in synthesised grain on playback. Nathan also looks ahead in the Q&A talking about integration into RTP, WebRTC and why Broadcasters would want to use AV1.

Watch now!

Speaker

Nathan Egge
Video Codec Engineer,
Mozilla

Video: HEVC/H.265 Video Coding Standard

Posted on 9th April 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

HEVC, also known as H.265 is often discussed even many years after its initial release fro MPEG with some saying that people aren’t using it and others saying its gaining traction. In reality, both sides have a point. Increasingly HEVC is being adopted partly because of wider implementation in products and partly because of a continued push toward higher resolution video which often gives the opportunity to make a clean break from AVC/H.264/MPEG 4.

This expert-led talk looks in detail at HEVC and how it’s constructed. For some, the initial part of the video will be enough. Others will want to bookmark the video to use as reference in their work, whilst still others will want to watch the whole things and will immediately find it puts parts of their work in better context.

Wherever you fit, I think you’ll agree this is a great resource for understanding HEVC streams enabling you to better troubleshoot problems.

Watch now!

Speakers

	David Marpe Head of Department Video Coding & Analytics, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute
	Karsten Suehring Project Manager, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute
	Benjamin Bross Project Manager, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute
	Dan Grois Former Senior Researcher, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute