The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Esports Broadcast Production

Posted on 22nd January 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Esports is entering the mainstream and continuing to grow. Even without the pandemic, esports was set to grow in 2020 and 2021; this growth has only been strengthened by the pandemic. The exclamations about getting paid to pay computer games are gradually giving way to conversations about the sport itself.

In this show, Eric Fischman from Blizzard Games tlks to hosts Michael Clouse and Ben Ganz about his work producing TV shows followig esports, specifically the Blizzard Overwatch league. Overwatch is an action based shooter with a team of 6 playing against another team of 6. This works perfectly for esports because the game is inherently a team event whereby each gamer has to rely on others in his team.

Eric produces the daily pre- and post-show for the event and says that the workflows he uses are no different from those at ESPN or similar sports broadcasters. The only difference is that they have an added function – observers. Observers act as camera operators within the game showing key events from behind the perpetrator’s shoulder or from above to see everything unfold.

Eric sees his job as to humanise the stars which helps the viewers connect and care about them. Just like traditional sports will have colour pieces which tell you more about the athletes you like, so do these shows give you the same insight into the individuals but also the story of the event as a whole.

Investors are currently very happy to come in and buy teams. Eric explains that Blizzard’s approach is to establish geographic teams such as London, Singapore and a whole host of American cities. And it’s not just VCs behind the action, Comcast Sports Group has bought in the Philadephia team,

The gamers work hard, often 12 hours a day learning the game and its changes. This can lead to mental fatigue or other problems so players get a week or more off between most tournaments. While they’re doing that, they figure about what the ‘meta’ of the game is. This is another word for determining the best approach to winning the game and as the game is patched, the meta can change.

An interesting discussion is what’s the longevity of esports both as a genre of sports and per game. Since the mid 1850s, we have been playing rugby. We will still be playing esports in 100 years time, but will they be recognisable?

There was a lot more to the conversation so please:
Watch now!
Speakers

	Eric Fischman Features Producer, Global Broadcast Blizzard Entertainment
	Ben Ganz President, Vego
	Host: Michael Clouse Host & Producer I COULD NEVER BE

Video: Native Processing of Transport Streams to/from Uncompressed IP

Posted on 21st January 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

As much as the move to IP hasn’t been trivial for end-users, it’s been all the harder for vendors who have had to learn all the same lessons as end-users, but also press the technology into action. Whilst broadcast is building on the expertise, success and scale of the IT industry, we are also pushing said technology to its limits and, in some cases, in ways not yet seen by the IT industry at large.

Kieran Kunhya from encoder and decoder vendor Open Broadcast Systems, explains to us the problems faced in making this work for software-based systems. As we heard earlier this week on The Broadcast Knowledge, the benefits of moving functions away from bespoke hardware are the ability to move your workflows more easily into data centres or even the cloud. Indeed, flexibility is one important factor for OBS which is why they are a software-first company. Broadcast workflows have been traditionally static and still, today, tends to only do one thing so a move to software removes the dependence on specific, custom chips.

The move to IP has many benefits, as Kieran outlines next. In today’s pandemic, a big benefit is simply not needing a person to go and move an SDI cable. But freeing ourselves from SDI, we hear, is more than just that. Kieran acknowledges that SDI achieves ultra-low delay in the realm of microseconds to move gigabits of video, but this comes at a high price. Each cable only carries one signal and only in one direction, but more critically routers top out at 1152×1152 in size. Whilst this does seem like a large number, larger operators are finding this is is simply not enough as they continue to both expand their offerings and also merge (compare Comcast’s NBC and Sky businesses).

The industry, by looking towards higher bandwidth and more scalable technologies for video has solved many of these problems. The bandwidth routing capability of IT switches can be in the terabits with each port being 100 or 400Gbps. Each cable works bidirectionally and, typically, carries multiple signals. This not leaves the infrastructure future-proof to moves, say, to 8K video but enables much denser routing of signals well above 1152×1152. The result of Kieran’s work is 64 channel encoding/decoding in 2U which can replace up to a full rack of traditional equipment.

This success hasn’t come without a lot of work. The timings are very tight and getting standard servers to deliver 100% of packets onto a network within 20 microseconds takes hard-won knowledge. Kieran explains that two of the keys to success are using kernel bypass techniques where he’s able to write directly into the memory space the NIC uses rather than the traditional method which would take the data via the Linux kernel. Secondly, he uses SIMD CPU instructions directly. This can speed up code by up to twenty times compared to C and only needs to be done once per CPU generation.

Once these techniques are harnessed, OBS still has to deal with the variety of unusual pixel formats, the difficulty of reference counting with many small buffers, uncompressed audio which has low bitrate and short 125 microsecond packets. Coupled with other equipment which doesn’t verify checksums, doesn’t use timestamps and doesn’t necessarily hadn’t 16 channel flows, making this work is tough but Kieran’s very clear the benefits of uncompressed IP video are worth it.

Watch now!
Speakers

Kieran Kunhya
Founder & CEO
Open Broadcast Systems

Video: Building an 8k encoder + live streaming platform

Posted on 20th January 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Streamline is a reference system design for premium quality, end to end live streaming all the way from SDI to a player fed from a CDN that works on the web, iOS, and Android devices. It uses commodity computer hardware, free software, and AWS to create an affordable way to learn how to build a high-quality live streaming system.

Already capable of 4K, this project is ideal for people to use as a learning tool to get first-hand experience of how live video works end to end. Now, the project is being extended to be able to four 4K 60fps feeds, or a single 8K stream. Ths update is called Streamline 2.

Colleen Henry from Facebook introduces the hardware behind the feat as comprising two NVIDIA QUADRO GPUs and one large CPU – a Ryzen 3990x. The equipment is perfectly capable of 8K, but the goal actually is to have enough power to deal with 10bit, 4K, HDR, high frame-rate feeds. The kit’s also intended to be able to encode AV1, LCEVC and VP9. Colleen suggests considering using the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 as a pre-built Threadripper desktop rather than building yourself.

Code for the project can be found at https://streamline.wtf. After encoding, the rest of the work is done in AWS. Caitlin O’Callaghan talks us through how to set up AWS by setting up an m4.xlarge server with the correct firewall and building the code from the Streamline 2 repository and then shows us how to install the encoder.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Colleen Henry Cobra Commander of Facebook Video Special Forces.
	Caitlin O’Callaghan Former Software Engineering Co-op, Facebook

Video: Scaling Video with AV1!

Posted on 19th January 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

A nuanced look at AV1. If we’ve learnt one thing about codecs over the last year or more, it’s that in the modern world pure bitrate efficiency isn’t the only game in town. JPEG 2000 and, now, JPEG XS, have always been excused their high bitrate compared to MPEG codecs because they deliver low latency and high fidelity. Now, it’s clear that we also need to consider the computational demand of codec when evaluating which to use in any one situation.

John Porterfield welcomes Facebook’s David Ronca to understand how AV1’s arriving on the market. David’s the director of Facebook’s video processing team, so is in pole position to understand how useful AV1 is in delivering video to viewers and how well it achieves its goals. The conversation looks at how to encode, the unexpected ways in which AV1 performs better than other codecs and the state of the hardware and software decoder ecosystem.

David starts by looking at the convex hull, explaining that it’s a way of encoding content multiple times at different resolutions and bitrates and graphing the results. This graph allows you to find the best combination of bitrate and resolution for a target quality. This works well, but the multiple encodes burdens the decision with a lot of extra computation to get the best set of encoding parameters. As proof of its effectiveness, David cites a time when a 200kbps max target was given for and encoder of video plus audio. The convex hull method gave a good experience for small screens despite the compromises made in encoding fidelity. The important part is being flexible on which resolution you choose to encode because by allowing the resolution to drift up or down as well as the bitrate, higher fidelity combinations can be found over keeping the resolution fixed. This is called per-title encoding and was pioneered by Netflix as discussed in the linked talk, where David previously worked and authored this blog post on the topic.

It’s an accepted fact that encoder complexity increases for every generation. Whilst this makes sense, particularly in the standard MPEG line where MPEG 2 gave way to AVC which gave way to HEVC which is now being superseded by VVC all of which achieved an approximately 50% compression improvement at the cost of a ten-fold computation increase. But David contends that this buries the lede. Whilst it’s true that the best (read: slowest) compression improves by 50% and has a 10% complexity increase, it’s often missed that at the other end of the curve, one of the fastest settings of the newer codec can now match the best of the old codec with a 90% reduction in computation. For companies working in the software world encoding, this is big news. David demonstrates this by graphing the SVT-AV1 encoder against the x265 HEVC encoder and that against x264.

David touches on an important point, that there is so much video encoding going on in the tech giants and distributed around the world, that it’s important for us to keep reducing the complexity year on year. As it is now, with the complexity increasing with each generation of encoder, something has to give in the future otherwise complexity will go off the scale. The Alliance for Open Media’s AV1 has something to say on the topic as it’s improved on HEVC with only a 5% increase in complexity. Other codecs such as MPEG’s LCEVC also deliver improved bitrate but at lower complexity. There is a clear environmental impact from video encoding and David is focused on reducing this.

AOM is also fighting the commercial problem that codecs have. Companies don’t mind paying for codecs, but they do mind uncertainty. After all, what’s the point in paying for a codec if you still might be approached for more money. Whilst MPEG’s implementation of VVC and EVC aims to give more control to companies to help them control their risk, AOM’s royalty-free codec with a defence fund against legal attacks, arguably, gives the most predictable risk of all. AOM’s aim, David explains, is to allow the web to expand without having to worry about royalty fees.

Next is some disappointing news for AV1 fans. Hardware decoder deployments have been delayed until 2023/24 which probably means no meaningful mobile penetration until 2026/27. In the meantime the very good dav1d decoder and also gav1 are expected to fill the gap. Already quite fast, the aim is for them to be able to do 720p60 decoding for average android devices by 2024.

Watch now!
Speakers

	David Ronca Director, Video Encoding, Facebook
	Freelance Video Webcast Producer and Tech Evangelist JP’sChalkTalks YouTube Channel

Subscribe to get daily updates