Video: What is Happening with IMF?

IMF is an interchange format designed for post-production/studios versioning requirements. It reduces storage required for multi-version projects but also provides for a standard way of exchanging metadata between companies.

Annie Chang covers the history briefly of IMF showing what it was aiming to achieve. IMF has been standardised through SMPTE as ST 2067 and has gained traction within the industry hence the continued interest in extending the standard. As with all modern standards, this has been created to be extensible, so Annie gives details on what is being added to it and where these endeavours have got to.
 

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Speaker

Annie Chang Annie Chang
VP, Creative Technologies,
Universal Pictures

Video: Live Closed Captioning and Subtitling in SMPTE 2110-40

The ST 2110-40 standard specifies the real-time, RTP transport of SMPTE ST 291-1 Ancillary Data packets. It allows to create IP essence flow carrying VANC data known from SDI (like AFD, closed captions or triggering), complementing the existing video and audio portions of the SMPTE ST 2110 suite.

In this video, Bill McLaughlin introduces 2110-40 and shows its advantages for closed captioning. With video, audio and ancillary data broken into separate essence flows, you no longer need full SDI bandwidth to process closed captioning and transcription can be done by subscribing to a single audio stream which bandwith is less than 1 Mbps. That allows for a very high processing density, with up to 100 channels of closed captioning in 1 RU server.

Another benefit is that a single ST 2110-40 multicast containing closed captioning can be associated with multiple videos (e.g. for two different networks or dirty and clean feeds), typically using NMOS connection management. This translates into additional bandwidth savings and lower cost, as you don’t need separate CC/Subtitling encoders working in SDI domain.

Test and measurment equipment for ST 2110-40 is still under developmnent. However, with date rates of 50-100 kbps per flow monitoring is very managable and you can use COTS equipment and generic packet analyser like Wireshark with dissector available on Github.

Speaker

Bill McLaughlin
VP Product Development
EEG Enterprises

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

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!
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Speaker

Ciro Noronha Ciro Noronha
Director of Technology,
Cobalt Digital

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


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

Oliver Gunasekara Oliver Gunasekara
Founder. & CEO,
NGCodec