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Video: Timing Requirements in Broadcast Applications

Posted on 13th November 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

How does timing for AES67 and SMPTE ST 2110-30 work? All is revealed in this short video by Andrea Hildebrand who explains why we need PTP timing and how we relate the absolute time to the signals themselves.

In a network for audio streams, Andreas starts, we want all the streams to run on their native sample rate, use the same clock, but also want to have the possibility of multiple concurrent streams using different sample rates. Also, it’s important to have a deterministic end-to-end latency and that, when streams arrive, they should be suitably aligned. We achieve all of this by distributing time around the system. Audio has very high accuracy requirements of down to within 10 microseconds for typical 48KHz broadcast signals, but AES11 requires within 1 microsecond which is why the Precision Time Protocol, PTP is used which is defined by the standard IEEE 1588. For more information on PTP, check out our PTP back library

End devices run their own local clocks, synchronised to the PTP on the network. In charge of it all, there is a grandmaster locked to GPS which can then distribute to other secondary clocks which feed the end devices. The end device can generate a media clock from the PTP and by using PTP, different facilities can be kept in time with each other. All media is then timestamped with the time when they were generated. For advice on architecting PTP, have a listen to this talk from Arista’s Gerard Phillips.

RTP is used to carry professional media streams like AES. RTP builds on top of UDP to add the critical timing information we need. Namely, the timestamp but also the sequence number. Andreas looks at the structure of the RTP packet header to see where the timestamp and identifiers go. To follow up on the IT basics underpinning AES67 and SMPTE ST 2110, check out Ed Calverley’s presentation on the topic.

‘Profiles’ are required to link the time of day to media flows – to give the time some meaning in terms of the expected signal. The AES67 Media Profile does this for AES67 as an annexe in the standard. SMPTE use ST 2059 to define how to use AES67 as well as all the other essences it supports and relate them all back to an originating epoch time in 1970.

The talk finishes by looking at the overlap in timing specs for AES67 and ST 2110-30 (AES67 for 2110). For more information on how AES67 and ST 2110 work (and don’t work) together, watch Andreas’s ‘Deeper dive’ on the topic.

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Speakers

Andreas Hildebrand
RAVENNA Evangelist
ALC NetworX

Video: IP-based Networks for UHD and HDR Video

Posted on 9th November 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

If you get given a video signal, would you know what type it was? Life used to be simple, an SD signal would decode in a waveform monitor and you’d see which type it was. Now, with UHD and HDR, this isn’t all the information you need. Arguably this gets easier with IP and is possibly one of the few things that does. This video from AIMS helps to clear up why IP’s the best choice for UHD and HDR.

John Mailhot from Imagine Communications joins Wes Simpson from LearnIPVideo.com to introduce us to the difficulties wrangling with UHD and HDR video. Reflecting on the continued improvement of in-home displays’ ability to show brighter and better pictures as well as the broadcast cameras’ ability to capture much more dynamic range, John’s work at Imagine is focussed on helping broadcasters ensure their infrastructure can enable these high dynamic range experiences. Streaming services have a slightly easier time delivering HDR to end-users as they are in complete control of the distribution chain whereas often in broadcast, particularly with affiliates, there are many points in the chain which need to be HDR/UHD capable.

John starts by looking at how UHD was implemented in the early stages. UHD, being twice the horizontal and twice the vertical resolution of HD is usually seen as 4xHD, but, importantly, John points out that this is true for resolution but, as most HD is 1080i, it also represents a move to 1080p, 3Gbps signals. John’s point is that this is a strain on the infrastructure which was not necessarily tested for initially. Given the UHD signal, initially, was carried by four cables, there is now 4 times the chance of a signal impairment due to cabling.

Square Division Multiplexing (SQD) is the ‘most obvious’ way to carry UHD signals with existing HD infrastructure. The picture is simply cut into four quarters and each quarter is sent down one cable. The benefit here is that it’s easy to see which order the cables need to be connected to the equipment. The downsides included a frame-buffer delay (half a frame) each time the signal was received, difficulties preventing drift of quadrants if they were treated differently by the infrastructure (i.e. there was a non-synced hand-off). One important problem is that there is no way to know an HD feed is from a UHD set or just a lone 3G signal.

2SI, two-sample interleave, was another method of splitting up the signal which was standardised by SMPTE. This worked by taking a pair of samples and sending them down cable 1, then the next pair down cable 2, the pair of samples under the first pair went down cable 3 then the pair under 2 went down 4. This had the happy benefit that each cable held a complete picture, albeit very crudely downsampled. However, for monitoring applications, this is a benefit as you can DA one feed and send this to a monitor. Well, that would have been possible except for the problem that each signal had to maintain 400ns timing with the others which meant DAs often broke the timing budget if they reclocked. It did, however, remove the half-field latency burden which SQD carries. The main confounding factor in this mechanism is that looking at the video from any cable on a monitor isn’t enough to understand which of the four feeds you are looking at. Mis-cabling equipment leads to subtle visual errors which are hard to spot and hard to correct.

Enter the VPID, the Video Payload ID. SD SDI didn’t require this, HD often had it, but for UHD it became essential. SMPTE ST 425-5:2019 is the latest document explaining payload ID for UHD. As it’s version five, you should be aware that older equipment may not parse the information in the correct way a) as a bug and b) due to using an old standard. The VPID carries information such as interlaced/progressive, aspect ratio, transfer characteristics (HLG, SDR etc.), frame rate etc. John talks through some of the common mismatches in interpretation and implementation of VPID.

12G is the obvious baseband solution to the four-wires problem of UHD. Nowadays the cost of a 12G transceiver is only slightly more than 3G ones, therefore 12G is a very reasonable solution for many. It does require careful cabling to ensure the cable is in good condition and not too long. For OB trucks and small projects, 12G can work well. For larger installations, optical connections are needed, one signal per fibre.

The move to IP initially went to SMPTE ST 2022-6, which is a mapping of SDI onto IP. This meant it was still quite restrictive as we were still living within the SDI-described world. 12G was difficult to do. Getting four IP streams correctly aligned, and all switched on time, was also impractical. For UHD, therefore SMPTE ST 2110 is the natural home. 2110 can support 32K, so UHD fits in well. ST 2110-22 allows use of JPEG XS so if the 9-11Gbps bitrate of UHDp50/60 is too much it can be squeezed down to 1.5Gbps with almost no latency. Being carried as a single video flow removes any switch timing problems and as 2110 doesn’t use VPID, there is much more flexibility to fully describe the signal allowing future growth. We don’t know what’s to come, but if it’s different shapes of video rater, new colour spaces or extensions needed for IPMX, these are possible.

John finishes his conversation with Wes mentioning two big benefits of moving to IT-based infrastructure. One is the ability to use the free Wireshark or EBU List tools to analyse video. Whilst there are still good reasons to buy test equipment, the fact that many checks can be done without expensive equipment like waveform monitors is good news. The second big benefit is that whilst these standards were being made, the available network infrastructure has moved from 25 to 100 to 400Gbps links with 800Gbps coming in the next year or two. None of these changes has required any change in the standards, unlike with SDI where improvements in signal required improvements in baseband. Rather, the industry is able to take advantage of this new infrastructure with no effort on our part to develop it or modify the standards.

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Speakers

	John Mailhot Systems Architect, IP Convergence, Imagine Communications
	Wes Simpson RIST AG Co-Chair, VSF President & Founder, LearnIPvideo.com

Video: Keeping Time with PTP

Posted on 4th November 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Different from his talk of the same name we covered last week, Mike Waidson from Telestream explains the fundamentals of PTP joined by Leigh Whitcomb from Imagine Communications and Robert Welch from Arista. Very few PTP talks include a live BCMA quiz plus, with more time than the IP Showcase talks, this is a well-paced, deep look into the basics.

Mike starts by reviewing how the measurement of time has been more and more accurately measured with us now, typically using atomic clocks. In the TV-domain analogue video used signals for B&B which gave frequency information in the subcarrier and allowed frequency locking and to keep in sync with other signals. NTP has allowed computers and routers on IP networks to keep lock allowing sub-millisecond synchronisation over LANs. Now we have IEEE 1588 PTP which harnesses hardware for maximum precision providing sub-microsecond precision.

Traditionally an SPG would create many different synchronising signals, distributed by DAs. With PTP however, the idea is creating a single time signal on to the network (as well as older signals if necessary). Although, the important thing to remember is that PTP both sends and receives data from the endpoints. GPS is made from 31 active satellites of which only 4 are needed for a lock. But other systems such as the Russian GLONASS, the Chinese BAIDU Navigational system or the European Galileo can also be used, sometimes in conjunction with each other to improve locking speed or give resilience.

Mike and his co-hosts give an overview of the standards that make all this possible, starting with the PTP standard itself IEEE 1588-2019 which is added to by SMPTE 2059. The latter is two standards that, together ensure broadcast devices can usefully harness PTP which is a general, cross-industry standard and track all signals back to a single point in time in 1970. Whilst this may seem extreme, the benefit of doing this is that if we know that all possible types of signal were in-phase at this one point in time, we can extrapolate how each signal should be phased now and use that information to synchronise the system. Upcoming to PTP, we hear, are standardised ways to monitor PTP plus additional security around the standard.

The next section looks at the types of Grandmaster and the fact that each clock works in its own domain. Typically, all your system will be in the same domain, but if you have incompatible situations such as older Dante networks or if you want to have a testing environment, you can use domains to separate your equipment. The standard, as defined by SMPTE 2059 is 127.

Mike then looks at the different types of PTP Message types: Announce, Sync & Follow up, Delay Request, Delay Response and Management Messages (broadcast information, drop second, time zone etc.) He then brings some of these up in Wireshark and talks us through the structure and what can be found within.

The most original part of the talk is the live walkthrough of three different scenarios where Leigh and Robert talk through their thinking on which clock will be the grandmaster and for what reason. This comes down to their understanding of the order of precedence of the metrics such as the manually-allotted priority, then the class of clock, clock accuracy and other values. One value worth remembering is that if your clock is locked to GPS it will have a class of 6, but if it then loses lock, it will become 7.

PTP talks are not complete without an explanation of the sync message exchanges needed to actually determine the time (and the relative delays in order to compute it) as well as the secondary clock types, boundary and transparent. Boundary clocks take on much of the two-way traffic in PTP protecting the grandmasters from having to speak directly to all the, potentially, thousands of devices. Transparent switches, simply update the time announcements with the delay for the message to move through the switch. Whilst this is useful in keeping the timing accurate, it provides no protection for the grandmasters.

Before the talk finishes with a Q&A, the team finish by explaining the difference between operating in unicast and multicast, prioritising PTP traffic using the differentiated services protocol and adding redundancy to the PTP system.

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Free registration required
Speakers

	Robert Welch Technical Solultions Lead, Arista
	Leigh Whitcomb Principal Engineer. Imagine
	Mike Waidson Application Engineer, Telestream

Video: IPMX – The Need for a New ProAV Standard

Posted on 2nd November 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

IPMX is an IP specification for interoperating Pro AV equipment. As the broadcast industry is moving towards increasing IP deployments based on SMPTE 2110 and AMWA’s NMOS protocols, there’s been a recognition that the Pro AV market needs to do many of the same things Broadcast wants to do. Moreover, there is not an open standard in Pro AV to achieve this transformation. Whilst there are a number of proprietary alliances, which enable wide-spread use of a single chip or software core, this interoperability comes at a cost and ultimately is underpinned by one, or a group of companies.

Dave Chiappini from Matrox discusses the work of the AIMS Pro AV working group with Wes Simpson from the VSF. Dave underlines the fact that this is a pull to unify the Pro AV industry to help people avoid investing over and over again in reinventing protocols or reworking their products to interoperate. He feels that ‘open standards help propel markets forward’ adding energy and avoiding vendor lock-in. This is one reason for the inclusion of NMOS, allowing any vendor to make a control system by working to the same open specification, opening up the market to both small and large companies.

Dave is the first to acknowledge that the Pro AV market’s needs are different to broadcast’s, and explains that they have calibrated settings, added some and ‘carefully relaxed’ parts of the standards. The aim is to have a specification which allows one piece of equipment, should the vendor wish to design it this way, that can be used in either an IPMX or ST 2110 system. He explains that the idea of relaxing some aspects of the ST 2110 ecosystem helps simplify implementation which therefore reduces cost.

One key relaxation has been in PTP. A lot of time and effort goes into making the PTP infrastructure work properly within SMPTE 2110 infrastructure. Having to do this at an event whilst setting up in a short timespan is not helpful to anyone and, elaborates Dave, a point to point video link simply doesn’t need high precision timing. IPMX, therefore, is lenient in the need for PTP. It will use it when it can, but will gracefully reduce accuracy and, when there is no grandmaster, will still continue to function.

Another difference in the Pro AV market is the need for compression. Whilst there are times when zero compression is needed in both AV and Broadcast, Pro AV needs the ability to throw some preview video out to an iPad or similar. This isn’t going to work with JPEG XS, the preferred ‘minimal compression’ codec for IPMX, so a system for including H264 or H265 is being investigated which could have knock-on benefits for Broadcast.

HDMI is essential for a Pro AV solution and needs its own treatment. Different from SDI, it has lots of resolutions and frame rates. It also has HDCP so AIMS is now working with the DCP on creating a method of carrying HDCP over 2110. It’s thus hoped that this work will help broadcast use cases. TVs are already replacing SDI monitors, such interoperability with HDMI should bring down the costs of monitoring for non-picture critical environments.

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Speakers

	David Chiappini Chair, Pro AV Working Group, AIMS Executive Vice President, Research & Development, Matrox Graphics Inc.
	Wes Simpson RIST AG Co-Chair, VSF President & Founder, LearnIPvideo.com