Russell Trafford-Jones, Author at The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: AES67 Open Media Standard for Pro-Audio Networks

Posted on 18th February 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

AES67 is a method of sending audio over IP which was standardised by the Audio Engineering Society as a way of sending uncompressed video over networks between equipment. It’s become widespread and is part of SMPTE’s professional essences-over-IP standards suite, ST 2110.

Here, Conrad Bebbington gives us an introduction to AES67 explaining why AES67 exists and what it tries to achieve. Conrad then goes on to look at interoperability with other competing standards like Dante. After going into some implementation details, importantly, the video then looks the ‘Session Description Protocol’, SDP, and ‘Session Initialisation Protocol’, SIP which are important parts of how AES67 works.

Video: VMAF – the Journey Continues

Posted on 15th February 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

VMAF is a video quality metric created by Netflix which allows computers to indicate what quality a video is. This is an important part of evaluating how good your encoder or streaming service is so it’s no surprise that Netflix has invested years of research into this. Other metrics such as PSNR and MS-SSIM all have their problems – and let’s accept that no metric is perfect – but what the industry has long grappled with is that a video that has a strong fidelity to the source doesn’t necessarily look better than one that less-faithfully replicates the source.

Imagine you had a video of an overcast day and one encoder rendered the video a bit brighter and a bit more blue. Well, for that clip, people watching might prefer that encoder even though the video is quite different from the source. The same is true of noisy pictures where replicating the noise isn’t always the best idea as some people, for some content, would prefer the cleaner look even though some details may have been lost.

As such, metrics have evolved from PSNR which is much more about fidelity to metrics which try harder to model what ‘looks good’ and VMAF is an example of that.

Zhi Li explains the history of VMAF and explains some of the new features which were released in August 2018, when this talk was given, which gives an insight into the way VMAF works. Plus, there’s a look ahead at new features on the road map. This talk was given at a SF Video Technology meet up.

Watch now!

Speakers

Zhi Li
Senior Software Engineer – Video Algorithms and Research
Netflix

Video: Designing and Utilising SMPTE 2110 for Broadcast: Opportunities and Challenges

Posted on 14th February 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

A meeting of experienced minds here at the Pittsburgh SMPTE section talking about the opportunities and challenges of ST-2110. Phil Myers from Lawo talks optimistically about the challenges that can and often have been solved in implementing 2110 whether that be network infrastructure or timing, giving a good primer on the whole topic as he starts the session.

Hugo Gaggioni from Sony, talks about NMOS, explaining what AMWA does and the difference between their IS-04,05 and 06 specifications.

Karl Kuhn from Tektronix then discusses packet pacing, PTP and network architectures. He then looks at how to monitor PTP and see it is working well.

With the panel session at the end, joined by Dan Turk from NEP, there is a free-ranging discussion covering some of the following topics:

Control of IP networks
The limits of IP
Multicast traffic
Network Architecture
True non-blocking switches
Break-even points of IP systems
Split essences & dropping blanking
Network planning for UHD
Handling loss of network on PTP implementations
plus much more!

Watch now!

Speakers

	Phil Myers Senior Director, IP Systems, Lawo
	Karl Kuhn Senior Field Video Applications Engineer, Tektronix
	Hugo Gaggioni CTO, Broadcast and Production Systems Division Sony
	Dan Turk Chief Engineer, Mobile Units NEP

Video: Enhanced Redundancy of ST 2059-2 Time Transfer over ST 2022-7 Redundant Networks

Posted on 13th February 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

We’re all starting to get the hang of the basics: that PTP is the new Black and Burst, that we still need sync to make studios work and that PTP (IEEE1588) is standardised under ST 2059 for use in the broadcast industry. So given its importance, how can we make it redundant?

Thomas Kernen from Mellanox and Chair within the STMPE standards community takes about his real-lift work on implementing PTP with an eye on redundancy methods

Thomas covers the following and more: