Video

Video: Specification of Live Media Ingest

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

“Standardisation is more than just a player format”. There’s so much to a streaming service than the video, a whole ecosystem needs to work together. In this talk from Comcast’s Mile High Video 2019, we see how different parts of the ecosystem are being standardised for live ingest.

RTMP and Smooth streaming are being phased out – without proper support for HEVC, VVC, HDR etc. they are losing relevance as well as, in the case of RTMP, support from the format itself. Indeed it’s clear that fragmented MP4 (fMP4) and CMAF are taking hold in their place so it makes sense for a new ingest standard to coalesce around these formats.

Rufael Mekuria from Unified streaming explains this effort to create a spec around live media ingest that is happening as part of MPEG DASH-IF. The work itself started at the end of 2017 with the aim of publishing summer 2019 supporting CMAF and DASH/HLS interfaces.

Rufael explains CMAF ingest used HTTP post to move each media stream to the origin packager. The tracks are separated into video, audio, timed text, subtitle and timed metadata. They are all transferred on separate tracks and is compatible with future codecs. He also covers security and timed text before covering DASH/HLS ingest which can also contain CMAF because HLS contains the capability to contain CMAF.

Reference software is available along with the <a href=”http://”https://dashif-documents.azurewebsites.net/Ingest/master/DASH-IF-Ingest.pdf” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>specification.

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Speaker

Rufael Mekuria Rufael Mekuria
Head of Research & Standardisation,
Unified Streaming

Video: Recent trends in live cloud video transcoding using FPGA acceleration

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

FPGAs are flexible, reprogrammable chips which can do certain tasks faster than CPUs, for example, video encoding and other data-intensive tasks. Once the domain of expensive hardware broadcast appliances, FPGAs are now available in the cloud allowing for cheaper, more flexible encoding.

In fact, according to NGCodec founder Oliver Gunasekara, video transcoding makes up a large percentage of cloud work loads and this increasing year on year. The demand for more video and the demand for more efficiently-compressed video both push up the encoding requirements. HEVC and AV1 both need much more encoding power than AVC, but the reduced bitrate can be worth it as long as the transcoding is quick enough and the right cost.

Oliver looks at the likely future adoption of new codecs is likely to playout which will directly feed into the quality of experience: start-up time, visual quality, buffering are all helped by reduced bitrate requirements.

It’s worth looking at the differences and benefits of CPUs, FPGAs and ASICs. The talk examines the CPU-time needed to encode HEVC showing the difficulty in getting real-time frame rates and the downsides of software encoding. It may not be a surprise that NGCodec was acquired by FPGA manufacturer Xilinx earlier in 2019. Oliver shows us the roadmap, as of June 2019, of the codecs, VQ iterations and encoding densities planned.

The talk finishes with a variety of questions like the applicability of Machine Learning on encoding such as scene detection and upscaling algorithms, the applicability of C++ to Verilog conversion, the need for a CPU for supporting tasks.

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Speakers

Former CEO, founder & president, NGCodec
Oliver is now an independent consultant.

Oliver Gunasekara Oliver Gunasekara

Video: What’s New in NMOS? – A Tutorial on the Latest in Video over IP Control and Security

Posted on by Adam K

The Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS) have been developed to provide a control and management layer along side the SMPTE ST 2110 transport layer. The idea behind NMOS was to deliver an open specification to provide the software layers that abstract a lot of complexities of ST 2110 and make it easy to interface with any control system.

The NMOS family of specifications began with projects for Discovery & Registration, Device Connection Management and Network Control, but has grown to include many other important subjects such as Event & Tally, Audio Channel Mapping and Interoperable Security.

In this video, Jed Deame discusses the latest advancements including IS-08, IS-09, BCP-002, BCP-003 and IS-10. These additions allows NMOS to surpass the level of control provided in SDI while also adding a layer of security.

The following Interface Specifications and Best Current Practices are presented:

  • IS-04 (Registration and Discovery) – new features: support for GPI over Ethernet (IS-07) and authorisation signalling for security layers BCP-003-02
  • IS-05 (Connection Management) – new features: MQ Telemetry Transport and WebSocket Transport, support for supplementary externally defined parameters
  • IS-08 (Audio Mapping) – audio routing / shuffling facility
  • IS-09 (System Resources) – System ID, server priority, security with HTTPS support, advertisement of system resources such as RDS (Registration and Discovery Server)
  • BCP-002 (Grouping) – uses tag resources in IS-04 in order to achieve a natural groups of senders and receivers (e.g. to tie audio, video and metadata)
  • BCP-003-01 (Security) – uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) in order to encrypt communications between API servers and their clients
  • BCP-003-02 (Security) – covers client authorization for the NMOS APIs
  • IS-10 (Authorisation API) – accompanies the BCP-003-02 specification to restrict what users are authorized to change in an NMOS system (core technologies: PKI, HTTPS, REST, JSON, Oauth 2.0 and JWT)

The presentation finishes with the customer case study – secure KVM all over an IP network.

You can download the slides from here.

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You might also be interested in the following videos we have published on The Broadcast Knowledge:

Speaker

Jed Deame
CEO
Nextera Video

Video: DASH Updates

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

MPEG DASH is a standardised method for encapsulating media for streaming similar to Apple’s HLS. Based on TCP, MPEG DASH is a widely compatible way of streaming video and other media over the internet.

MPEG DASH is now on its 3rd edition, its first standard being in 2011. So this talk starts by explaining what’s new as of July 2019 in this edition. Furthermore, there are amendments already worked on which are soon to add more features.

Iraj Sodagar explains Service Descriptors which will be coming that allow the server to encapsulate metadata for the player which describes how the publisher intended to show the media. Maximum and minimum latency and quality is specified. for instance. The talk explains how these are used and why they are useful.

Another powerful metadata feature is the Initialization Set, Group and Presentation which gives the decoder a ‘heads up’ on what the next media will need in terms of playback. This allows the player to politely decline to play the media if it can’t display it. For instance, if a decoder doesn’t supply AV1, this can be identified before needing to attempt a decode or download a chunk.

Iraj then explains what will be in the 4th edition including the above, signalling leap seconds and much more. This should be published over the next few months.

Amendement 1 is working towards a more accurate timing model of events and defining a specific DASH profile for CMAF (the low-latency streaming technology based on DASH) which Iraj explains in detail.

Finishing off with session based DASH operations, a look over the DASH workplan/roadmap, ad insertion, event and timed metadata processing, this is a great, detailed look at the DASH of today and of 2020.

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Speaker

Iraj Sodagar Iraj Sodagar
Independant Consultant