The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: IPMX for Broadcast Installations?

Posted on 29th June 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

IPMX, the new ProAV IP challenger spec, is taking shape promising to tame SMPTE’s ST 2110 standards, make PTP useable and extend AMWA into managing HDCP. Is this a tall order and can it actually deliver? Taking us through the ins and out is Jean Lapierre from Matrox.

With or without IPMX, ProAV is moving to IP whether with SDVoE, ZeeVee or something else. There are a number of competing technologies, but we hear from Jean that IPMX is the only software-defined one. This is important because if you don’t require a chip to be an IPMX product and participate in ProAV workflows, then anything can support IPMX such as PCs, Laptops and mobile phones.

IPMX based on RTP, ST 2110, ST 2059 PTP and AMWA specifications IS-04, IS-05, IS-08 (audio channel mapping), IS-11 for EDID handling as well as NMOS security and best practice guidance. This seems like a lot, but to cover media transfer, registration, control, security and interfacing with display screens, this is the range of tech needed.

Compared to SMPTE ST 2110, the PTP profile is easier to deploy and produces less traffic, explains Jean, and IPMX even works without PTP which support for asynchronous signals. Support of HDCO is included along with a lower-latency FEC mode for those that find 2022-7 too costly or impractical to deploy. Lastly, Jean points out that thanks to the in-built support for JPEG XS, IPMX can support UHD workflows within a 1GbE infrastructure.

Jean continues by discussing the compatibility between 2110 and IPMX. In principle IPMX and 2110 senders and receivers are interchangeable. Jean goes into more detail, but the example would be that IPMX is managing the HDCP encryption of the source using AMWA NMOS IS-11. IS-11 is, naturally available to be used with any other technology including ST 2110. If it’s adopted, then HDCP-protected material can flow between the two systems.

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Speaker

Jean Lapierre
Senior Director, Advanced Technologies,
Matrox

Video: The State of NDI in 2021 & NDI Version 5

Posted on 28th June 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Released in 2015, NDI is a royalty-free technology that implements low-latency video, audio, tally and control over gigabit networking. Since 2015, NDI has grown in popularity immensely and is now very widely used within AV, live streaming production and in cloud workflows. Developed by Newtek, now part of VizRT, it allows computers to easily push video from programs onto the local network whether from Teams or Skype, a video Editor, OBS or anything else. Many vendors have taken the NDI binaries and integrated them into their products.

On The Broadcast Knowledge we’ve explored how NDI compliments SMPTE’s ST 2110 suite of standards which primarly help move uncompressed payloads around a broadcast suite. In this panel put on by the IET at IBC we explored the benefits of 2110 and NDI to understand where the overlap lies. And for a deeper dive into NDI including some demos, we also featured this talk by SMPTE and VizRT.

In today’s video from Key Code Media, we hear from Newtek’s Dr. Andrew Cross, creator of NDI on what’s new in NDI’s latest release, 5.0. Jeff Sengpiehl from Key Code Media explains that NDI 5.0 brings with it improvements in multi-platform support including native support for Apple Silicon. 5.0 also includes plugins for any program to share its audio over NDI as well as a way of sharing a link to get someone to share their video and audio by NDI. Part of the big changes, though in this latest version is the addition of ‘reliable UDP’ and ‘NDI Bridge’. Based on Google’s QUIC this provides a way of sending NDI over lossy networks allowing for it to recover lost data and deal with network congestion. This ties in nicely with ‘NDI Bridge’ which allows two or three separate locations to share their NDI sources and destinations seamlessly. These additional features bring NDI outside of the LAN. Being a layer 2 protocol, it’s always been seen as a local protocol even when deployed in the cloud.

The majority of the video features Dr. Cross answering questions from Jeff and viewers. These questions include:
What are the pain points with audio? Is NDI Audio Direct a replacement for Dante? Maintaining synchronisation in multi-location systems. The significance of support for ARM chips, bidirectional use of NDI, NDI Bridge security, 10-bit colour support, NDI’s place in the ProAV market and the possibility of NDI becoming open source or a standard.

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Speakers

	Andrew Cross Creator of NDI & President of Global Research and Development VizRT (NewTek/NDI)
	Moderator: Jeff Sengpiehl Chief Technologist Key Code Media

Video: Production Metadata Workflows & Standards for Media & Entertainment

Posted on 25th June 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Metadata has long been understood as important, particularly by archivists. But it’s only in recent years that a renewed focus has been put on metadata. As the large broadcasters and media houses have expanded and as streaming has become a bigger and bigger proportion of output, it’s become increasingly clear that a coherent, already-executed metadata strategy is essential. Recently, A+E had 5 weeks to transfer much of their inventory to Discovery+ which was achieved largely thanks to a cloud-to-cloud transfer and ingest workflow which not only checked the integrity of the media but also ensured metadata was correctly transferred.

In this video from SMPTE New York, we hear from WarnerMedia’s Yonah Levenson and Dave Satin about metadata and workflows. Yonah starts by defining the different types of metadata: Descriptive (e.g. time of day), Technical (e.g. File size, Compression), Administrative (e.g. Who created, last modified, location), Usage (e.g. when last used. how many times, Structural (e.g. Page numbers. Scene numbers), Preservation (e.g. location of file, checksum, retention policy) and Rights (e.g. Licensing, Permissions, Contracts, who signed off on rights).

Yonah gives examples on all of the above and then discusses standards and best practices for metadata such as starting with a spreadsheet, ensuring you get the right governance from the start, writing every decision down and getting a whole range of people involved to ensure your metadata plan is going to suit the company as a whole and not just your part of it.

Dave Satin takes the floor next and shows how the logical technical blocks of the video workflow interact with external software and services. On top of this, he then overlays the people needed to run these functions as well as the problems that generally come up. His over-archine point being that complex supply chains cause complex problems. He continues to highlight metadata pain points and which workflow problems they give rise to.

Dave finishes on a very compelling iceberg graphic showing much of the required functions in metadata lie below the surface of obvious requirements. The trick is to identify and adopt them into your workflows before crashing.

Yonah returns to the stage to introduce the Language Metadata Table, also known as LMT. First started in 2017, it’s grown to describing 239 languages with a further 150 on the way. Speaking earlier this year, Yonah explained “People speak different languages…you don’t know what they’re saying and we have this problem in the industry where there really hasn’t been a definitive, unified standard of language codes.” LMT addresses this problem and works for Audio, Visual (subs, narratives, Sign language), Content Licensing
Rights, Acquisition, Distribution content, Localisation preferences.

This is ongoing work between MESA and SMPTE to get this standardised. The working group will meet again soon.

The session closes with a long Q&A session which includes a discussion of camera-originated metadata, maximising metadata, when to start collecting metadata (when money starts being spent), use of metadata to tag ‘sprites’ used in films so the sprite can be localised to national sensitivities/cultural norms, finding ‘homes’ for metadata such as standards like AXF, logging regional restrictions on archive news footage, differences in camera-collected metadata, the importance of having the right metadata during obituaries, metadata conservation for archives intended for 150 years in the future.

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Speakers

	Will Kreth Meta Data Systems & Simply.TV DDEX WG co-chair
	Yonah Levenson Manager, Metadata Strategy & Taxonomy Governance, WarnerMedia / HBOMax
	James Snyder Library of Congress and SMPTE board member
	Dave Satin Digital Imaging Technician, HDR & 4K expert

Video: Examining the OTT Technology Stack

Posted on 24th June 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

This video looks at the whole streaming stack asking what’s now, what trends are coming to the fore and how are things going to be done better in the future? Whatever part of the stack you’re optimising, it’s vital to have a way to measure the QoE (Quality of Experience) of the viewer. In most workflows, there is a lot of work done to implement redundancy so that the viewer sees no impact despite problems happening upstream.

The Streaming Video Alliance’s Jason Thibeault diggs deeper with Harmonic’s Thierry Fautier, Brenton Ough from Touchstream, SSIMWAVE’s Hojatollah Yeganeh and Damien Lucas from Ateme.

Talking about Codecs, Thierry makes the point that only 7% of devices can currently support AV1 and with 10 billion devices in the world supporting AVC, he sees a lot of benefit in continuing to optimise this rather than waiting for VVC support to be commonplace. When asked to identify trends in the marketplace, moving to the cloud was identified as a big influencer that is driving the ability to scale but also the functions themselves. Gone are the days, Brenton says, that vendors ‘lift and shift’ into the cloud. Rather, the products are becoming cloud-native which is a vital step to enable functions and products which take full advantage of the cloud such as being able to swap the order of functions in a workflow. Just-in-time packaging is cited as one example.

Examining the OTT Technology Stack from Streaming Video Alliance on Vimeo.

Other changes are that server-side ad insertion (SSAI) is a lot better in the cloud and sub partitioning of viewers, where you do deliver different ads to different people, is more practical. Real-time access to CDN data allowing you near-immediate feedback into your streaming process is also a game-changer that is increasingly available.

Open Caching is discussed on the panel as a vital step forward and one of many areas where standardisation is desperately needed. ISPs are fed up, we hear, of each service bringing their own caching box and it’s time that ISPs took a cloud-based approach to their infrastructure and enabled multiple use servers, potentially containerised, to ease this ‘bring your own box’ mentality and to take back control of their internal infrastructure.

HDR gets a brief mention in light of the Euro soccer championships currently on air and the Japan Olympics soon to be. Thierry says 38% of Euro viewership is over OTT and HDR is increasingly common, though SDR is still in the majority. HDR is more complex than just upping the resolution and requires much more care over which screen it’s watched. This makes adopting HDR more difficult which may be one reason that adoption is not yet higher.

The discussion ends with a Q&A after talking about uses for ‘edge’ processing which the panel agrees is a really important part of cloud delivery. Processing API requests at the edge, doing SSAI or content blackouts are other examples of where the lower-latency response of edge compute works really well in the workflow.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Thierry Fautier VP Video Strategy. Harmonic Inc.
	Damien Lucas CTO, Ateme
	Hojatollah Yeganeh Research Team Lead SSIMWAVE
	Brenton Ough CEO & Co-Founder, Touchstream
	Moderator: Jason Thibeault Executive Director, Streaming Video Alliance

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