Bitmovin

Video: Debugging Streaming Errors with Video Analytics

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Errors in streaming often require deep knowledge that system specialsts and developers have, but getting them the data they need is often an uphill struggle. This video shows ways in which we can short circuit this problem showing some approaches that Bitmovin is taking to get the data to the right people. Bitmovin announced, yesterday, €25M of further investment in the company. We’ve featured Bitmovin many times here on The Broadcast Knowledge talking about codecs, low-latency live streaming or super-resolution. Reading through this full list makes it clear that Bitmovin’s interested in the whole chain from encode to delivery.

Christoph Prager sets the scene looking at an analysis of errors showing that only 15% have a clear reason with 65% being ambiguous. If an error’s ambiguous, you need data to drill into it and disambiguate the situation. This is exacerbated by the standard aggregate metrics which make getting to the root cause very difficult. Definitions of ‘buffering percentage’ and ‘startup time’ are very useful to gauge the scale of an issue or to find there’s even a problem to begin with. But for developers, they are like the foreword to the book they need to read to find the problem. This has led Bitmovin to think from the angle that errors are a lot more obvious when you have the data.

Daniel Hölbling-Inzko takes us through Bitmovin’s new features to expose data surrounding errors. Whilst these will be coming to Bitmovin products, they show what a useful set of tools for debugging would be and can inspire the same in your platform if you are able to customise those aspects of it. Daniel points out that the right detailed information can be useful to customer support, but it’s the deeper information that he’s interested it. Bitmovin can collate all the stack traces from problem places but also track segments from the time there was an error.

Segment tracking shows the status, type, download speed, time to first byte and the size of each of 10 segments from around the time the error was collected. Viewing these can help see trends such as diminishing bandwidth or just simply show that a problem happened abruptly. Daniel talks through three errors where segment tracking can help you pinpoint problems: ‘NETWORK_SEGMENT_DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT’, ‘ANALYTICS_BUFFERING_TIMEOUT’ and ‘DRM: license request failed’. Because the requests are now split out individually it makes it easy to see where the 403 error is that is stopping the DRM or how the internet speed is dropping resulting in an analytics timeout. Daniel highlights that it’s the trends that are usually the most important part.

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Speakers

Christoph Prager Christoph Prager
Product Manager, Analytics
Bitmovin
Daniel Hölbling-Inzko Daniel Hölbling-Inzko
Engineering Director, Analytics
Bitmovin

Video: Cloud Encoding – Overview & Best Practices

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

There are so many ways to work in the cloud. You can use a monolithic solution which does everything for you which is almost guaranteed by its nature to under-deliver on features in one way or another for any non-trivial workflow. Or you could pick best-of-breed functional elements and plumb them together yourself. With the former, you have a fast time to market and in-built simplicity along with some known limitations. With the latter, you may have exactly what you need, to the standard you wanted but there’s a lot of work to implement and test the system.

Tom Kuppinen from Bitmovin joins Christopher Olekas from SSIMWAVE and host of this Kirchner Waterloo Video Tech talk on cloud encoding. After the initial introduction to ‘middle-aged’ startup, Bitmovin, Tom talks about what ‘agility in the cloud’ means being cloud-agnostic. This is the, yet unmentioned, elephant in the room for broadcasters who are so used to having extreme redundancy. Whether it’s the BBC’s “no closer than 70m” requirement for separation of circuits or the standard deployment methodology for systems using SMPTE’s ST 2110 which will have two totally independent networks, putting everything into one cloud provider really isn’t in the same ballpark. AWS has availability zones, of course, which is one of a number of great ways of reducing the blast radius of problems. But surely there’s no better way of reducing the impact of an AWS problem than having part of your infrastructure in another cloud provider.

Bitmovin have implementations in Azure, Google Cloud and AWS along with other cloud providers. In this author’s opinion, it’s a sign of the maturity of the market that this is being thought about, but few companies are truly using multiple cloud providers in an agnostic way; this will surely change over the next 5 years. For reliable and repeatable deployments, API control is your best bet. For detailed monitoring, you will need to use APIs. For connecting together solutions from different vendors, you’ll need APIs. It’s no surprise that Bitmovin say they program ‘API First’; it’s a really important element to any medium to large deployment.

 

 

When it comes to the encoding itself, per-title encoding helps reduce bitrates and storage. Tom explains how it analyses each video and chooses the best combination parameters for the title. In the Q&A, Tom confirms they are working on implementing per-scene encoding which promises more savings still.

To add to the complexity of a best-of-breed encoding solution, using best-of-breed codecs is part and parcel of the value. Bitmovin were early with AV1 and they support VP9 and HEVC. They can also distribute the encoding so that it’s encoded in parallel by as many cores as needed. This was their initial offering for AV1 encoding which was spread over more than 200 cores.

Tom talks about how the cloud-based codecs can integrate into workflows and reveals that HDR conversion, instance pre-warming, advanced subtitling support and AV1 improvements are on the roadmap while leads on to the Q&A. Questions include whether it’s difficult to deploy on multiple clouds, which HDR standards are likely to become the favourites, what the pain points are about live streaming and how to handle metadata.

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Speakers

Tom Kuppinen Tom Kuppinen
Senior Sales Engineer,
Bitmovin
Moderator: Christopher Olekas
Senior Software Engineer,
SSIMWAVE Inc.

Video: Super Resolution: What’s the buzz and why does it matter?

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

“Enhance!” the captain shouts as the blurry image on the main screen becomes sharp and crisp again. This was sci-fi – and this still is sci-fi – but super-resolution techniques are showing that it’s really not that far-fetched. Able to increase the sharpness of video, machine learning can enable upscaling from HD to UHD as well as increasing the frame rate.

Bitmovin’s Adithyan Ilangovan is here to explain the success they’ve seen with super-resolution and though he concentrates on upscaling, this is just as relevant to improving downscaling. Here are our previous articles covering super resolution.

Adithyan outlines two main enablers of super-resolution, allowing it to displace the traditional methods such as bicubic and Lanczos. Enabler one is the advent of machine learning which now has a good foundation of libraries and documentation for coders allowing it to be fairly accessible to a wide audience. Furthermore, the proliferation of GPUs and, particularly for mobile devices, neural engines is a big help. Using the GPUs inside CPUs or in desktop PCI slots allows the analysis to be done locally without transferring great amounts of video to the cloud solely for the purpose of processing or identification. Furthermore, if your workflow is in the cloud, it’s now easy to rent GPUS and FPGAs to handle such workloads.

Using machine learning doesn’t only allow for better upscaling on a frame-by-frame basis, but we are also able to allow it to form a view of the whole file, or at least the whole scene. With a better understanding of the type of video it’s analysing (cartoon, sports, computer screen etc.) it can tune the upscaling algorithm to deal with this optimally.

Anime has seen a lot of tuning for super-resolution. Due to Anime’s long history, there are a lot of old cartoons which are both noisy and low resolution which are still enjoyed now but would benefit from more resolution to match the screens we now routinely used.

Adithyan finishes by asking how we should best take advantage of super-resolution. Codecs such as LCEVC use it directly within the codec itself, but for systems that have pre and post-processing before the encoder, Adithyan suggests it’s viable to consider reducing the bitrate to reduce the CDN costs knowing the using super-resolution on the decoder, the video quality can actually be maintained.

The video ends with a Q&A.

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Speaker

Adithyan Ilangovan Adithyan Ilangovan
Encoding Engineer,
Bitmovin

Video: State of Compression: Versatile Video Coding – H.266/VVC

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

An evolution from HEVC, VVC is a codec that not only delivers the traditional 50% bit rate reduction over its predecessor but also has specific optimisations for screen content (e.g. computer gaming) and 360-degree video.

Christian Feldmann from Bitmovin explains how VCC manages to deliver this bitrate reduction. Whilst VVC makes no claims to be a totally new codec, Christian explains that the fundamental way the codec works, at a basic level, is the same as all block-based codecs including MPEG 2 and AV1. The bitrate savings come from incremental improvements in technique or embracing a higher computation load to perform one function more thoroughly.

Block partitioning is one good example. Whilst AVC macroblocks are all 16×16 pixels in size, VVC allows 128×128 blocks. For larger areas of ‘solid’ colour, this allows for more efficiency. But the main advance comes in the fact you can sub-divide each of these blocks into different sized rectangles. Whilst sub-dividing has always been possible back to AVC, we have more possible shapes available now allowing the divisions to be created in closer alignment with the video.

Tiles and slices are a way of organising the macroblocks, allowing them to be treated together as a group. This is grouping isn’t taken lightly; each group can be decoded separately. This allows the video to be split into sub-videos. This can be used for multiviewer-style applications or, for instance, to allow multiple 4k decoders to decode a 16k. This could be one of those features which sees lots of innovative use…or, if it’s too complicated/restricted, will see no mainstream take-up.

Christian outlines other techniques such as intra-prediction where macroblocks are predicted from already-decoded macroblocks. Any time a codec can predict a value, this tends to reduce bitrate. Not because it necessarily gets it right, but because it then only needs an error correction, typically a smaller number, to give it the correct value. Similarly, prediction is also possible now between the Y, U and V channels.

Finishing off, Christian hits geometric partitioning, similar to AV1, which allows diagonal splitting of macroblocks with each section having separate motion vectors. He also explains affine motion prediction, allowing blocks to scale, rotate, change aspect ratio and shear. Finally Christian discusses the performance possible from the codec.

To find out more about VVC, including the content-based tuning such as for screen graphics, which is partly where the ‘versatile’ in VVC’s name comes from, listen to this talk, from 19 minutes in, given by Benjamin Bross from Fraunhofer. For Christian’s summary of all this year’s new MPEG codecs, see his previous video in the series.

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Speaker

Christian Feldmann Christian Feldmann
Team Lead, Encoding
Bitmovin