David Griggs Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: Creating Interoperable Hybrid Workflows with RIST

Posted on 7th April 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

TV isn’t made in one place anymore. Throughout media and entertainment, workflows increasingly involve many third parties and being in the cloud. Content may be king, but getting it from place to place is foundational in our ability to do great work. RIST is a protocol that is able to move video very reliably and flexibly between buildings, into, out of and through the cloud. Leveraging its flexibility, there are many ways to use it. This video helps review where RIST is up to in its development and understand the many ways in which it can be used to solve your workflow problems.

Starting the RIST overview is Ciro Noronha, chair of the RIST Forum. Whilst we have delved in to the detail here before in talks like this from SMPTE and this talk also from Ciro, this is a good refresher on the main points that RIST is published in three parts, known as profiles. First was the Simple Profile which defined the basics, those being that it’s based on RTP and uses an ARQ technology to dynamically request any missing packets in a timely way which doesn’t trip the stream up if there are problems. The Main Profile was published second which includes encryption and authentication. Lastly is the Advanced Profile which will be released later this year.

Ciro outlines the importance of the Simple Profile. That it guarantees compatibility with RTP-only decoders, albeit without error correction. When you can use the error correction, you’ll benefit from correction even when 50% of the traffic is being lost unlike similar protocols such as SRT. Another useful feature for many is multi-link support allowing you to use RIST over bonded LTE modems as well as using SMPTE ST 2022-7

The Main Profile brings with it support for tunnelling meaning you can set up one connection between two locations and put multiple streams of data through. This is great for simplifying data connectivity because only one port needs to be opened in order to deliver many streams and it doesn’t matter in which direction you establish the tunnel. Once established, the tunnel is bi-directional. The tunnel provides the ability to carry general data such as control data or miscellaneous IT.

Encryption made its debut with the publishing of the Main Profile. RIST can use DTLS which is a version of the famous TLS security used in web sites that runs on UDP rather than TCP. The big advantage of using this is that it brings authentication as well as encryption. This ensures that the endpoint is allowed to receive your stream and is based on the strong encryption we are familiar with and which has been tested and hardened over the years. Certificate distribution can be difficult and disproportionate to the needs of the workflow, so RIST also allows encryption using pre-shared keys.

Handing over now to David Griggs and Tim Baldwin, we discuss the use cases which are enabled by RIST which is already found in encoders, decoders and gateways which are on the market. One use case which is on the rise is satellite replacement. There are many companies that have been using satellite for years and for whom the lack of operational agility hasn’t been a problem. In fact, they’ve also been able to make a business model work for occasional use even though, in a pure sense, satellite isn’t perfectly suited to occasional use satellites. However, with the ability to use C-band closing in many parts of the world, companies have been forced to look elsewhere for their links and RIST is one solution that works well.

David runs through a number of others including primary and secondary distribution, links aggregation, premium sports syndication with the handoff between the host broadcaster and the multiple rights-holding broadcasters being in the cloud and also a workflow for OTT where RIST is used for ingest.

RIST is available as an open source library called libRIST which can be downloaded from videolan and is documented in open specifications TR-06-1 and TR-06-2. LibRIST can be found in gstreamer, Upipe, VLC, Wireshark and FFmpeg.

The video finishes with questions about how RIST compares with SRT. RTMP, CMAF and WebRTC.

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Speakers

	Tim Baldwin Head of Product, Zixi
	David Griggs Senior Product Manager, Distribution Platforms Disney Streaming Services
	Ciro Noronha President, RIST Forum Executive Vice President of Engineering, Cobalt Digital

Video: Reliable and Uncompressed Video on AWS

Posted on 10th November 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Uncompressed video in the cloud is an answer to the dreams that many people are yet to have, but the early adopters of cloud workflows, those that are really embedding the cloud into their production and playout efforts are already asking for it. AWS have developed a way of delivering this between computers within their infrastructure and have invited a vendor to explain how they are able to get this high-bandwidth content in and out.

On The Broadcast Knowledge we don’t normally feature such vendor-specific talks, but AWS is usually the sole exception to the rule as what’s done in AWS is typically highly informative to many other cloud providers. In this case, AWS is first to the market with an in-prem, high-bitrate video transfer technology which is in itself highly interesting.

LTN’s Alan Young is first to speak, telling us about the traditional broadcast workflows of broadcasters giving the example of a stadium working into the broadcaster’s building which then sends out the transmission feeds by satellite or dedicated links to the transmission and streaming systems which are often located elsewhere. LTN feel this robs the broadcaster of flexibility and cost savings from lower-cost internet links. The hybrid that he sees working in medium-term is feeding the cloud directly from the broadcaster. This allows production workflows to take place in the cloud. After this has happened, the video can either come back to the broadcaster before on-pass to transmission or go directly to one or more of the transmission systems. Alan’s view is the interconnecting network between the broadcaster and the cloud needs to be reliable, high quality, low-latency and able to handle any bandwidth of signal – even uncompressed.

Once in the cloud, AWS Cloud Digital Interface (CDI) is what allows video to travel reliably from one computer to another. Andy Kane explains what the drivers were to create this product. With the mantra that ‘gigabits are the new megabits’, they looked at how they could move high-bandwidth signals around AWS reliably with the aim of abstracting the difficulty of infrastructure away from the workflow. The driver for uncompressed in the cloud is reducing re-encoding stages since each of them hits latency hard and, for professional workflows, we’re trying to keep latency as close to zero as possible. By creating a default interface, the hope is that inter-vendor working through a CDI interface will help interoperability. LTN estimate their network latency to be around 200ms which is already a fifth of a second, so much more latency on top of that is going to creep up to a second quite easily.

David Griggs explains some of the technical detail of CDI. For instance, it has the ability to send data of any format be that raw packetised video, audio, ancillary data or compressed data using UDP, multicast between EC2 instances within a placement group. With a target latency of less than one frame, it’s been tested up to UHD 60fps and is based on the Elastic Fabric Adapter which is a free option for EC2 instances and uses kernel bypass techniques to speed up and better control network transfers. CPU use scales linearly so where 1080p60 takes 20% of a CPU, UHD would take 80%. Each stream is expected to have its own CPU.

The video ends with Alan looking at the future where all broadcast functionality can be done in the cloud. For him, it’s an all-virtual future powered by the increasingly accessible high-bandwidth internet connectivity coming in a less than the cost of bespoke, direct links. David Griggs adds that this is changing the financing model moving from a continuing effort to maximise utilisation of purchased assets, to a pay as you go model using just the tools you need for each production.

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Download the slides
Please note, if you follow the direct link the video featured in this article is the seventh on the linked page.

Speakers

	David Griggs Senior Product Manager, AWS
	Andy Kane Principal Business Development Manager, AWS
	Alan Young CTO and Head of Strategy, LTN Global

Video: Delivering Quality Video Over IP with RIST

Posted on 21st October 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

RIST continues to gain traction as a way to deliver video reliably over the internet. Reliable Internet Stream Transport continues to find uses both as part of the on-air signal chain and to enable broadcast workflows by ensuring that any packet loss is mitigated before a decoder gets around to decoding the stream.

In this video, AWS Elemental’s David Griggs explains why AWS use RIST and how RIST works. Introduced by LearnIPvideo.com’s Will Simpson who is also the co-chair of the RIST Activity Group at the VSF. Wes starts off by explaining the difference between consumer and business use-cases for video streaming against broadcast workflows. Two of the pertinent differences being one-directional video and needing a fixed delay. David explains that one motivator of broadcasters looking to the internet is the need to replace C-Band satellite links.

RIST’s original goals were to deliver video reliably over the internet but to ensure interoperability between vendors which has been missing to date in the purest sense of the word. Along with this, RIST also aimed to have a low, deterministic latency which is vital to make most broadcast workflows practical. RIST was also designed to be agnostic to the carrier type being internet, satellite or cellular.

Source: RIST Forum

Wes outlines how important it is to compensate for packet loss showing that even for what might seem low packet loss situations, you’ll still observe a glitch on the audio or video every twenty minutes. But RIST is more than just a way of ensuring your video/audio arrives without gaps, it. can also support other control signals such as PTZ for cameras, intercom feeds, ad insertion such as SCTE 35, subtitling and timecode. This is one strength which makes RIST ideal for broadcast over using, say RTMP for delivering a live stream.

Wes covers the main and simple profile which are also explained in more detail in this video from SMPTE and this article. One way in which RIST is different from other technologies is GRE tunnelling which allows the carriage of any data type alongside RIST and also allows bundling of RIST streams down a single connecting. This provides a great amount of flexibility to support new workflows as they arise.

David closes the video by explaining why RIST is important to AWS. It allows for a single protocol to support media transfers to, from and within the AWS network. Also important, David explains, is RIST’s standards-based approach. RIST is created out of many standards and RFC with very little bespoke technology. Moreover, the RIST specification is being formally created by the VSF and many VSF specifications have gone on to be standardised by bodies such as SMPTE, ST 2110 being a good example. AWS offer RIST simple profile within MediaConnect with plans to implement the main profile in the near future.

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Speakers

	David Griggs Senior Product Manager, Media Services, AWS Elemental
	Wes Simpson RIST AG Co-Chair, President & Founder, LearnIPvideo.com

Video: RIST Unfiltered – Q&A Session

Posted on 15th October 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

RIST is a protocol which allows for reliable streaming over lossy networks like the internet. Whilst many people know that much, they may not know more and may have questions. Today’s video aims to answer the most common questions. For a technical presentation of RIST, look no further than this talk and this article

Kieran Kunhya deals out the questions to the panel from the RIST Forum, RIST members and AWS. Asking:
Does RIST need 3rd party equipment?
Is there an open-source implementation of RIST?
Whether there are any RIST learning courses?
as well as why companies should use RIST over SRT.
RIST, we hear is based on RTP which is a very widely deployed technology for real-time media transport and is widely used for SMPTE 2022-2 and 6 streams, SMPTE 2110, AES67 and other audio protocols. So not only is it proven, but it’s also based on RFCs along with much of RIST. SRT, the panel says, is based on the UDT file transfer protocol which is not an RFC and wasn’t designed for live media transport although SRT does perform very well for live media.

“Why are there so many competitors in RIST?” is another common question which is answered by talking about the need for interoperability. Fostering widespread interoperability will grow the market for these products much more than it would with many smaller protocols. “What new traction is RIST getting?” is answered by David Griggs from AWS who says they are committed to the protocol and find that customers like the openness of the protocol and are thus willing to invest their time in creating workflows based on it. Adi Rozenberg lists many examples of customers who are using the technology today. You can hear David Griggs explain RIST from his perspective in this talk.

Other questions handled are the licence that RIST is available under and the open-source implementations, the latency involved in using RIST and whether it can carry NDI. Sergio explains that NDI is a TCP-based protocol so you can transmit it by extracting UDP out of it, using multicast or using a VizRT-tool for extracting the media without recompressing. Finally, the panel looks at how to join the RIST Activity Group in the VSF and the RIST Forum. They talk about the origin of RIST being in an open request to the industry from ESPN and what is coming in the upcoming Advanced Profile.

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Speakers

	Rick Ackermans RIST AG Chair, Director of RF & Transmission Engineering, CBS Television
	David Griggs Senior Product Manager, Media Services, AWS Elemental
	Sergio Ammirata RIST AG Member, Chief Science Officer, SipRadius
	Adi Rozenberg RIST Forum Director AG Member, Co-Founder & CTO, VideoFlow
	Ciro Noronha RIST Forum President and AG Member EVP of Engineering, Cobalt Digital
	Paul Atwell RIST Forum Director, President, Media Transport Solutions
	Wes Simpson RIST AG Co-Chair, President & Founder, LearnIPvideo.com
	Kieran Kunhya RIST Forum Director Founder & CEO, Open Broadcast Systems

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