Video: The Fundamentals of Virtualisation

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Virtualisation is continuing to be a driving factor in the modernisation of broadcast workflows both from the technical perspective of freeing functionality from bespoke hardware and from the commercial perspective of maximising ROI by increasing utilisation of infrastructure. Virtualisation itself is not new, but using it in broadcast is still new to many and the technology continues to advance to deal with modern bitrate and computation requirements.

In these two videos, Tyler Kern speaks to Mellanox’s Richard Hastie, NVIDIA’s Jeremy Krinitt and John Naylor from Ross Video explain how virtualisation fits with SMPTE ST 2110 and real-time video workflows.

Richard Hastie explains that the agility is the name of the game by separating the software from hardware. Suddenly your workflow, in principle can be deployed anywhere and has the freedom to move within the same infrastructure. This opens up the move to the cloud or to centralised hosting with people working remotely. One of the benefits of doing this is the ability to have a pile of servers and continually repurpose them throughout the day. Rather than have discrete boxes which only do a few tasks, often going unused, you can now have a quota of compute which is much more efficiently used so the return on investment is higher as is the overall value to the company. As an example, this principle is at the heart of Discovery’s transition of Eurosport to ST 2110 and JPEG XS. They have centralised all equipment allowing for the many countries around Europe which have production facilities to produce remotely from one, heavily utilised, set of equipment.

Part I

John Naylor explains the recent advancements brought to the broadcast market in virtualisation. vMotion from VMware allows live-migration of virtual. machines without loss of performance. When you’re running real-time graphics, this is really important. GPU’s are also vital for graphics and video tasks. In the past, it’s been difficult for VMs to have full access to GPUs, but now not only is that practical but work’s happened to allow a GPU to be broken up and these reserved partitions dedicated to a VM using NVIDIA Ampere architecture.
John continues by saying that VMWare have recently focussed on the media space to allow better tuning for the hypervisor. When looking to deploy VM infrastructures, John recommends that end-users work closely with their partners to tune not only the hypervisor but the OS, NIC firmware and the BIOS itself to deliver the performance needed.

“Timing is the number one challenge to the use of virtualisation in broadcast production at the moment”

Richard Hastie

Mellanox, now part of NVIDIA, has continued improving its ConnectX network cards, according to Richard Hastie, to deal with the high-bandwidth scenarios that uncompressed production throws up. These network cards now have onboard support for ST 2110, traffic shaping and PTP. Without hardware PTP, getting 500-nanosecond-accurate timing into a VM is difficult. Mellanox also use SR-IOV, a technology which bypasses the software switch in the hypervisor, reducing I/O overhead and bringing performance close to non-virtualised performance. It does this by partitioning the PCI bus meaning one NIC can present itself multiple times to the computer and whilst the NIC is shared, the software has direct access to it. For more information on SR-IOV, have a look at this article and this summary from Microsoft.

Part II

Looking to the future, the panel sees virtualisation supporting the deployment of uncompressed ST 2110 and JPEG XS workflows enabling a growing number of virtual productions. And, for virtualisation itself, a move down from OS-level virtualisation to containerised microservices. Not only can these be more efficient but, if managed by an orchestration layer, allow for processing to move to the ‘edge’. This should allow some logic to happen. much closer to the end-user at the same time as allowing the main computation to be centralised.

Watch part I and part II now!
Speakers

Tyler Kern Tyler Kern
Moderator
John Naylor John Naylor
Technology Strategist & Director of Product Security
Ross
Richard Hastie Richard Hastie
Senior Sales Director, Business Development
NVIDIA
Jeremy Krinitt Jeremy Krinitt
Senior Developer Relations Manager
NVIDIA

Video: Where The Puck Is Going: What’s Next for Esports & Sports Streaming

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

How’s sports streaming changing as the pandemic continues? Esports has the edge on physical sports as it allows people to compete from diverse locations. But both physical and esports benefit from bringing people into one place and getting the fans to see the players.

This panel from Streaming Media, moderated by Jeff Jacobs, looks at how producers, publishers, streamers and distributors reacted to 2020 and where they’re positioning themselves to be ahead in 2021. The panel opens by looking at the tools and the preferred workflows. There are so many ways to do remote production. Sam Asfahani from OS Studios, explained how they had already adopted some remote workflows to keep costs down but he has been impressed at the number of innovations released which help improve remote production. He explains they have a physical NDI Control room where they also use VMix for contribution. The changed workflows during the pandemic have convinced them that the second control room they were planning to build should now be in the cloud.

Aaron Nagler from Cheesehead TV discussed the way he’s stopped flying to watch games and has changed to watching syncronised using LiveX Director with his co-presenter. Within a few milliseconds, he is seeing the same footage so they can both present and comment in real-time. Intriguingly, Tyler Champley from Poker Central explains that, for them, remote production hasn’t been needed since the tournaments have been canceled and they use their studio facilities. Their biggest issue is that their players need to be in the same room to play the game, close to each other and without masks.

Link to video

The panel discusses what will stick after the pandemic. Sam makes the point that he’s gone from paying $20,000 for a star to stay overnight and be part of the show. The pandemic has made it so that sports stars are happy to be paid $5,000 for the two hours on a programme without having to leave their house and the show saves money too. He feels this will continue to be an option on an on-going basis, though the panel notes that technical capability is limited with contributors, even top dollar talent without anyone else there to help. Tyler says that his studio has been more in demand during Covid so his team has become better at tear-downs to accommodate multiple uses. And lastly, the panel makes the point that hybrid programme making models are going to continue.

After some questions from the audience, the panel comments on future strategies. Sean Gardner from Xilinx talks about the need and arrival of newer codecs such as AV1 and LCEVC can help do deliver lower bitrates and/or lower latency. Aaron mentions that he’s seen ways of gamifying the streams which he hasn’t used before which helps with monetising. And Sam leaves us with the thought that game APIs can help create fantastic productions when they’re done well, but he sees an even better future where APIs allow information to be fed back into the game which will be able to create a two-way event between the fans and the game.

Watch now!
Speakers

Jeff Jacobs Moderator:Jeff Jacobs
Executive Vice President & General Manager,
VENN
Aaron Nagler Aaron Nagler
Co-Founder,
Cheesehead TV
Sam Asfahani Sam Asfahani
CEO,
OS Studios
Sean Gardner Sean Gardner
Snr Manager, Market Development & Strategy, Cloud Video,
Xilinx
Tyler Champley Tyler Champley
VP Marketing & Audience Development,
Poker Central

Video: AES67/ST 2110-30 over WAN

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Dealing with professional audio, it’s difficult to escape AES67 particularly as it’s embedded within the SMPTE ST 2110-30 standard. Now, with remote workflows prevalent, moving AES67 over the internet/WAN is needed more and more. This talk brings the good news that it’s certainly possible, but not without some challenges.

Speaking at the SMPTE technical conference, Nicolas Sturmel from Merging Technologies outlines the work being done within the AES SC-02-12M working group to define the best ways of working to enable easy use of AES67 on the WAn. He starts by outlining the fact that AES67 was written to expect short links on a private network that you can completely control which causes problems when using the WAN/internet with long-distance links on which your bandwidth or choice of protocols can be limited.

To start with, Nicolas urges anyone to check they actually need AES67 over the WAN to start with. Only if you need precise timing (for lip-sync for example) with PCM quality and low latencies from 250ms down to as a little as 5 milliseconds do you really need AES67 instead of using other protocols such as ACIP, he explains. The problem being that any ping on the internet, even to something fairly close, can easily take 16 to 40ms for the round trip. This means you’re guaranteed 8ms of delay, but any one packet could be as late as 20ms known as the Packet Delay Variation (PDV).

Link

Not only do we need to find a way to transmit AES67, but also PTP. The Precise Time Protocol has ways of coping for jitter and delay, but these don’t work well on WAN links whether the delay in one direction may be different to the delay for a packet in the other direction. PTP also isn’t built to deal with the higher delay and jitter involved. PTP over WAN can be done and is a way to deliver a service but using a GPS receiver at each location is a much better solution only hampered by cost and one’s ability to see enough of the sky.

The internet can lose packets. Given a few hours, the internet will nearly always lose packets. To get around this problem, Nicolas looks at using FEC whereby you are constantly sending redundant data. FEC can send up to around 25% extra data so that if any is lost, the extra information sent can be leveraged to determine the lost values and reconstruct the stream. Whilst this is a solid approach, computing the FEC adds delay and the extra data being constantly sent adds a fixed uplift on your bandwidth need. For circuits that have very few issues, this can seem wasteful but having a fixed percentage can also be advantageous for circuits where a predictable bitrate is much more important. Nicolas also highlights that RIST, SRT or ST 2022-7 are other methods that can also work well. He talks about these longer in his talk with Andreas Hildrebrand

Watch now!
Speaker

Nicolas Sturmel Nicolas Sturmel
Product Manager, Senior Technologist,
Merging Technologies

Video: Decoder Complexity Aware AV1 Encoding Optimization

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

AV1’s been famous for very low encoding speed, but as we’ve seen from panel like this, AV1 encoding times have dropped into a practical range and it’s starting to gain traction. Zoe Liu, CEO of Visionular, is here to talk at Mile High Video 2020 about how careful use of encoding parameters can deliver faster encodes, smooth decodes, and yet balance that balance with codec efficiency.

Zoe starts by outlining the good work that’s been done with the SVT-AV1 encoder which leaves it ready for deployment, as we heard previously from David Ronca of Facebook. Similarly the Dav1d decoder has recently made many speed improvements, now being able to easily decode 24fps on mobiles using between 1.5 and 3 Snapdragon cores depending on resolution. Power consumption has been measured as higher than AVC decoding but less than HEVC. Further to that, hardware support is arriving in many devices like TVs.

Zoe then continues to show ways in which encoding can be sped up by reducing the calculations done which, in turn, increased decoder speed. Zoe’s work has exposed settings that significantly speed up decoding but have very little effect on the compression efficiency of the codec which opens up use cases where decoding was the blocker and a 5% reduction in the ability to compress is a price worth paying. One example cited is ignoring partition sizes of less than 8×8. These small partitions can be numerous and bog down calculations but their overall contribution to bitrate reduction is very low.

All of these techniques are brought together under the heading of Decoder Complexity Aware AV1 Encoding Optimization which, Zoe explains, can result in an encoding speed-up of over two times the original framerate i.e. twice real-time on an Intel i5. Zoe concludes that this creates a great opportunity to apply AV1 to VOD use cases.

Watch now!
Speaker

Zoe Liu Zoe Liu
CEO,
Visionular