Video: NMOS: The API for IPMX

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

IPMX promises a ‘plug and play’ out-of-the-box experience, but with uncompressed SMPTE ST 2110 video and audio underneath. Given many tier 1 broadcasters have invested months or years implementing ST 2110. So how can IPMX deliver on its promise to the Pro-AV market?

Andrew Starks from Macnica presents this talk explaining how NMOS will fit into IPMX. Key to enabling a minimal config environment is the added mandatory specifications and standards within IPMX. For instance, while you can build an ST 2110 system without NMOS, that’s not an option for IPMX. The focus is on consistency and interoperability. Optional parts of IPMX cover HDCP carriage, USB, RS232 and IPV6. Many of the things often used within Pro-AV but may not be appropriate for low-cost, small use-cases.

Andrew gives an overview of IS-04 and IS-05 which allow for discovery and control of devices. He then looks at EDID and USB carriage and finishes by discussing why AMWA is choosing to use open specifications rather than creating standards.

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Speakers

Andrew Starks Andrew Starks
Director of Product Management,
Macnica Technology,

Video: Latency Still Sucks (and What You Can Do About It)

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

The streaming industry is on an ever-evolving quest to reduce latency to bring it in line with, or beat linear broadcasts and to allow business models such as gaming to flourish. When streaming started, latency of a minute or more was not uncommon and whilst there are some simple ways to improve that, getting down to the latency of digital TV, approximately 5 seconds, is not without challenges. Whilst the target of 5 seconds works for many use cases, it’s still not enough for auctions, gambling or ‘gamification’ which need sub-second latency.

In this panel, Jason Thielbaut explores how to reduce latency with Casey Charvet from Gigcasters, Rob Roskin from CenturyLink and Haivision VP Engineering, Marc Cymontkowski. This wide-ranging discussion covers CDN caching, QUIC and HTTP/3, encoder settings, segmented Vs. non-segmented streaming, ingest and distribution protocols.

Key to the discussion is differentiating the ingest protocol from the distribution protocol. Often, just getting the content into the cloud quickly is enough to bring the latency into the customer’s budget. Marc from Haivision explains how SRT achieves low-latency contribution. SRT allows unreliable networks like the Internet to be used for reliable, encrypted video contribution. Created by Haivision and now an Open Source technology with an IETF draft spec, the alliance of SRT users continues to grow as the technology continues to develop and add features. SRT is a ‘re-request’ technology meaning it achieves its reliability by re-requesting from the encoder any data it missed. This is in contrast to TCP/IP which acknowledges every single packet of data and is sent missing data when acknowledgements aren’t received. Doing it the SRT, way really makes the protocol much more efficient and able to cope with real-time media. SRT can also encrypt all traffic which, when sending over the internet, is extremely important even if you’re not sending live-sports. In this video, Marc makes the point that SRT also recovers the timing of the stream so that the data comes out the SRT pipe in the same ‘shape’ as it went in. Particularly with VBR encoding, your decoder needs to receive the same peaks and troughs as the encoder created to save it having to buffer the input as much. All this included, SRT manages to deliver a transport latency of around 2.5 times the round trip time.

Haivision are members of RIST which is a similar technology to SRT. Marc explains that RIST is approaching the problem from a standards perspective; taking IETF RFCs and applying them to RTP. SRT took a more pragmatic way forward by creating a binary which implemented the features and by making this open source for interoperability.

The video finishes with a Q&A covering HTTP Header compression, recommended size of HLS chunks, peer-to-peer streaming and latency requirements for VoD.

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Speakers

Rob Roskin Rob Roskin
Principal Solutions Architect,
Level3 Communications
Marc Cymontkowski Marc Cymontkowski
VP Engineering – Cloud,
Haivision
Casey Charvet Casey Charvet
Managing Director,
Gigcasters
Jason Thibeault Jason Thibeault
Executive Director,
Streaming Video Alliance

Video: HLS and DASH Multi-Codec Encoding & Packaging

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

As we saw yesterday, there’s an increasingly buoyant market for video codecs and whilst this is a breath of fresh air after AVC’s multi-decade dominance, we will likely never again see a market which isn’t fragmented with several dominant players, say AV1, AVC, VVC and VP9, each sharing 85% market share relatively equally and then ‘the rest’ bringing up the rear. So multi-codec distribution to home viewers is going to have to deal with delivering different codecs to different people.

fuboTV do this today and Nick Krzemienski is here to tell us how. Starting with an overview of fuboTV primarily streams both live and on VOD. Nick shows us the workflow they use and then explains how their AVC & HEVC combined workflow is set up. Starting with the ideal case where a single fmp4 is encoded into both AVD and HEVC, he proposes you would simply package both into an HLS and DASH manifest and let players work out the rest. Depending on your players, you may have to split out your manifests into single-codec files.

DRM’s very important for a sports broadcaster so Nick looks at how this might be achieved. CMAF allows you to deliver m3u8 and mpd files using CENC (Common ENCryption). This promises a single DRM process ahead of packaging, but the reality, we hear from Nick, is that you’ll need two sets of media for HLS and DASH if you’re going to use CENC.

When you’re delivering multiple manifest and, hence, multiple sources, how do you manage this? Nick outlines, and shows the code, of how he achieves this at the edge. Using Lamda, he’s able to look at the incoming requests and existing files at the CDN to deliver the right asset with the logic done close to the viewer. Nick closes by with his thoughts on the future for streaming and answering questions from the audience.

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Download the presentation
Speakers

Nick Krzemienski Nick Krzemienski
Engineering Lead, VOD Encoding & Operations, fuboTV
Maintainer & Editor, awesome.video
Dom Robinson Host: Dom Robinson
Director and Creative Firestarter, id3as
Contributing Editor, StreamingMedia.com, UK

Video: Outlook on the future codec landscape

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

VVC has now been released, MPEG’s successor to HEVC. But what is it? And whilst it brings 50% bitrate savings over HEVC, how does it compare to other codecs like AV1 and the other new MPEG standards? This primer answers these questions and more.

Christian Feldmann from Bitmovin starts by looking at four of the current codecs, AVC, HEVC, VP9 and AV1. VP9 isn’t often heard about in traditional broadcast circles, but it’s relatively well used online as it’s supported on Android phones and brings bitrate savings over AVC. Google use VP9 on Youtube for compatible players and see a higher retention rate. Netflix and Twitch also use it. AV1 is also in use by the tech giants, though its use outside of those who built it (Netflix, Facebook etc.) is not yet apparent. Christian looks at the compatibility of the codecs, hardware decoding, efficiency and cost.

Looking now at the other upcoming MPEG codecs, Christian examines MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC) which has two profiles: Baseline and Main. The baseline profile only uses technologies which are old enough to be outside of patent claims. This allows you to use the codec without the concern that you may be asked for a fee from a patent holder who comes out of the woodwork. The main profile, however, does have patented technology and performs better. Businesses which wish to use this codec can then pay licences but if an unexpected patent holder appears, each individual tool in the codec can be disabled, allowing you to protect continue using, albeit without that technology. Whilst it is a shame that patents are so difficult to account for, this shows MPEG has taken seriously the situation with HEVC which famously has hundreds of licensable patents with over a third of eligible companies not part of a patent pool. EVC performs 32% better than AVC using the baseline profile and 25% better than HEVC with the main profile.

Next under the magnifying glass is Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC). We’ve already heard about this on The Broadcast Knowledge from Guido, CEO of V-Nova who gave a deeper look at Demuxed 2019 and more recently at Streaming Media West. Whilst those are detailed talks, this is a great overview of the technology which is actually a hybrid approach to encoding. It allows you to take any existing codec such as AVC, AV1 etc. and put LCEVC on top of it. Using both together allows you to run your base encoder at a lower resolution (say HD instead of UHD) and then deliver to the decoder this low-resolution encode plus a small stream of enhancement information which the decoder uses to bring the video back up to size and add back in the missing detail. The big win here, as the name indicates, is that this method is very flexible and can take advantage of all sorts of available computing power in embedded technology as and in servers. In set-top boxes, parts of the SoC which aren’t used can be put to use. In phones, both the onboard HEVC decoding chip and the CPU can be used. It’s also useful in for automated workflows as the base codec stream is smaller and hence easier to decode, plus the enhancement information concentrates on the edges of objects so can be used on its own by AI/machine learning algorithms to more readily analyse video footage. Encoding time drops by over a third for AVC and EVC.

Now, Christian looks at the codec-du-jour, Versatile Video Codec (VVC), explaining that its enhancements over HEVC come not just from bitrate improvements but techniques which better encode screen content (i.e. computer games), allow for better 360 degree video and reduce delay. Subjective results show up to 50% improvement. For more detail on VVC, check out this talk from Microsoft’s Gary Sullivan.

The talk finishes with answers so audience questions: Which will be the winner, what future device & hardware support will be and which is best for real-time streaming.

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Speakers

Christian Feldmann Christian Feldmann
Team lead, Encoding,
Bitmovin