IPShowcase

Video: Timing Tails & Buffers

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Timing and synchronisation have always been a fundamental aspect of TV and as we move to IP, we see that timing is just as important. Whilst there are digital workflows that don’t need to be synchronised against each other, many do such as studio productions. However, as we see in this talk from The Broadcast Bridge’s Tony Orme, IP networks make timing all the more variable and accounting for this is key to success.

To start with Tony looks at the way the OBs, also known as REMIs, are moving to IP and need a timing plane across all of the different parts of production. We see how traditionally synchronisation is needed and the effect of timing problems not only in missed data but also with all essences being sent separately synchronisation problems between them can easily creep in.

When it comes to IP timing itself, Tony explains how PTP is used to record the capture time of the media/essences and distribute through the system. Looking at the data on the wire and the interval between that and the last will show a distribution of, hopefully, a few microseconds variation. This variation gives rise to jitter which is a varying delay in data arrival. The larger the spread, the more difficult it will be to recover data. To examine this more closely, Tony looks at the reasons for and the impacts of congestion, jitter, reordering of data.

Bursting, to make one of these as an example, is a much overlooked issue on networks. While it can occur in many scenarios without any undue problems, microbusting can be a major issue and one that you need to look for to find. This surrounds the issue of how you decide that a data flow is, say, 500Mbps. If you had an encoder which sent data at 1Gbps for 5 minutes and no data for 5 minutes, then over the 10 minute window, the average bitrate would have been 500Mbps. This clearly isn’t a 500Mbps encoder, but how narrow do you need to have your measurement window to be happy it is, indeed, 500Mbps by all reasonable definitions? Do you need to measure it over 1 second, 1 millisecond? Behind microbursting is the tendency of computers to send whatever data they have as quickly as possible; if a computer has a 10Gbe NIC, then it will send at 10Gbps. What video receivers actually need is well spaced packets which always come a set time apart.

Buffers a necessary for IP transmission, in fact within a computer there are many buffers. So using and understanding buffers is very important. Tony takes us through the thought process of considering what buffers are and why we need them. With this groundwork laid, understanding their use and potential problems is easier and well illustrated in this talk. For instance, since there are buffers in many parts of the chain to send data from an application to a NIC and have it arrive at the destination, the best way to maximise the chances of having a deterministic delay in the Tx path is to insert PTP information almost at the point of egress in the NIC rather than in the application itself.

The talk concludes by looking at buffer fill models and the problems that come with streaming using TCP/IP rather then UDP/IP (or RTP). The latter being the most common.

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Speakers

Tony Orme Tony Orme
Editor,
The Broadcast Bridge

Video: NMOS and ST 2110 Pro AV Roadmap

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

ProAV and Broadcast should be best buddies, but only a relatively few companies sell into both. This is because there are legitimate differences in what we need. That being said, interoperability is a helpful end goal for any industry. Whilst proprietary solutions can help kickstart new technologies and be a positive disruptive force, standardisation is almost always beneficial to the industry in the medium to long term.

Whilst broadcast is happy to live with 4:2:2 colour subsampling in much of its workflow, then deliver in 4:2:0, this is often not an option for ProAV who need to take full 4:4:4 4K at 60fps and throw it on a monitor. Whilst 4:4:4 has, technically been possible over SDI for a while, adoption even in the broadcast market has been small.

There are many opportunities for both industries to learn from each other, but it’s hard to overstate the difference in approach of the SMPTE 2110 and NMOS approach to the problem of media over IP compared to the SDVoE model. The former relies on detailed documentation published publicly for anyone who is willing to buy the standard to implement in any way they see fit be that in software or hardware. The latter specifies a chip which has a documented API that does all of the heavy lifting with no option for self-implementation. The fact that the same chip is used everywhere provides the guarantee of interoperability.

One technology which has bridged the gap between ProAV and broadcast is NDI from Vizrt’s Newtek which uses the same binary software application wherever it’s implemented thus providing, like in SDVoE, the interoperability required. The same is true for SRT although they have just released their first draft for IETF standardisation.

In this talk, PESA CTO Scott Barella examines the many existing standards within ProAV and examines their needs such as HDCP. Whilst HDCP, the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection mechanism, has often been grappled with by broadcasters, it is at least a standard. And it’s a standard that any vendor will have to deal with if they want their equipment to be widely used in the industry. Similarly the requirement for full-frame rate, full-colour UHD is not simply done within many boxes.

The use of PTP within SMPTE’s ST 2110 suite works perfectly in the studio, is arguably not necessary in much of ‘the cloud’ and is widely considered too complex for a ProAV environment. Scott explains that he has thoughts on how to simplify it to make it more practical and taking into account the different use cases.

Secondary interfaces are crucial in much ProAV whereby USB, RS 232 serial and GPI/GPO need to be transported along with the media. And whilst security and encryption are increasingly important for the broadcast industry as it comes to grips with the fact that all broadcasters are vulnerable to hacking attempts, their requirements are not as stringent as the military’s which drives a notable part of the ProAV market. All of these aspects are being considered as part of the ongoing work the Scott is involved with.

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Speaker

Scott Barella Scott Barella
CTO, PESA
AIMS co-chair.

Video: Live Closed Captioning and Subtitling in SMPTE 2110 (update)

Posted on by Adam K

The SMPTE ST 2110-40 standard specifies the real-time, RTP transport of SMPTE ST 291-1 Ancillary Data packets. It allows creation of IP essence flows carrying the VANC data familiar to us from SDI (like AFD, closed captions or ad triggering), complementing the existing video and audio portions of the SMPTE ST 2110 suite.

This presentation, by Bill McLaughlin from EEG, is an updated tutorial on subtitling, closed captioning, and other ancillary data workflows using the ST 2110-40 standard. Topics include synchronization, merging of data from different sources and standards conversion.

Building on Bill’s previous presentation at the IP Showcase), this talk at NAB 2019 demonstrates a big increase in the number of vendors supporting ST 2110-40 standard. Previously a generic packet analyser like Wireshark with dissector was recommended for troubleshooting IP ancillary data. But now most leading multiviewer / analyser products can display captioning, subtitling and timecode from 2110-40 streams. At the recent “JT-NM Tested Program” event 29 products passed 2110-40 Reception Validation. Moreover, 27 products passed 2110-40 Transmitter Validation which mean that their output can be reconstructed into SDI video signals with appropriate timing and then decoded correctly.

Bill points out that ST 2110-40 is not really a new standard at this point, it only defines how to carry ancillary data from the traditional payloads over IP. Special care needs to be taken when different VANC data packets are concatenated in the IP domain. A lot of existing devices are simple ST 2110-40 receivers which would require a kind of VANC funnel to create a combined stream of all the relevant ancillary data, making sure that line numbers and packet types don’t conflict, especially when signals need to be converted back to SDI.

There is a new ST 2110-41 standard being developed for additional ancilary data which do not match up with ancillary data standardised in ST 291-1. Another idea discussed is to move away from SDI VANC data format and use a TTML track (Timed Text Markup Language – textual information associated with timing information) to carry ancillary information.

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Download the slides.

Speakers

 

Bill McLaughlin Bill McLaughlin
VP of Product Development
EEG

Video: The Basics of SMPTE ST 2110 in 60 Minutes

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

SMPTE ST 2110 is a growing suite of standards detailing uncompressed media transport over networks. Now at 8 documents, it’s far more than just ‘video over IP’. This talk looks at the new ways that video can be transported, dealing with PTP timing, creating ‘SDPs’ and is a thorough look at all the documents.

Building on this talk from Ed Calverley which explains how we can use networks to carry uncompressed video, Wes Simpson goes through all the parts of the ST 2110 suite explaining how they work and interoperate as part of the IP Showcase at NAB 2019.

Wes starts by highlighting the new parts of 2110, namely the overview document which gives a high level overview of all the standard docs, the addition of compressed bit-rate video carriage and the recommended practice document for splitting a single video and sending it over multiple links; both of which are detailed later in the talk.

SMPTE ST 2110 is fundamentally different, as highlighted next, in that it splits up all the separate parts of the signal (i.e. video, audio and metadata) so they can be transferred and processed separately. This is a great advantage in terms of reading metadata without having to ingest large amounts of video meaning that the networking and processing requirements are much lighter than they would otherwise be. However, when essences are separated, putting them back together without any synchronisation issues is tricky.

ST 2110-10 deals with timing and knowing which packets of one essence are associated with packets of another essence at any particular point in time. It does this with PTP, which is detailed in IEEE 1588 and also in SMPTE ST 2059-2. Two standards are needed to make this work because the IEEE defined how to derive and carry timing over the network, SMPTE then detailed how to match the PTP times to phases of media. Wes highlights that care needs to be used when using PTP and AES67 as the audio standard requires specific timing parameters.

The next section moves into the video portion of 2110 dealing with video encapsulation on the networks pixel grouping and the headers needed for the packets. Wes then spends some time walking us through calculating the bitrate of a stream. Whilst for most people using a look-up table of standard formats would suffice, understanding how to calculate the throughput helps develop a very good understanding of the way 2110 is carried on the wire as you have to take note not only of the video itself (4:2:2 10 bit, for instance) but also the pixel groupings, UDP, RTP and IP headers.

Timing of packets on the wire isn’t anything new as it is also important for compressed applications, but it is of similar importance to ensure that packets are sent properly paced on wire. This is to say that if you need to send 10 packets, you send them one at a time with equal time between them, not all at once right next to each other. Such ‘micro bursting’ can cause problems not only for the receiver which then needs to use more buffers, but also when mixed with other streams on the network it can affect the efficiency of the routers and switches leading to jitter and possibly dropped packets. 2110-21 sets standards to govern the timing of network pacing for all of the 2110 suite.

Referring back to his warning earlier regarding timing and AES67, Wes now goes into detail on the 2110-30 standard which describes the use of audio for these uncompressed workflows. He explains how the sample rates and packet times relate to the ability to carry multiple audios with some configurations allowing 64 audios in one stream rather than the typical 8.

‘Essences’, rather than media, is a word often heard when talking about 2110. This is an acknowledgement that metadata is just as important as the media described in 2110. It’s sent separately as described by 2110-40. Wes explains the way captions/subtitles, ad triggers, timecode and more can be encapsulated in the stream as ancillary ‘ANC’ packets.

2110-22 is an exciting new addition as this enables the use of compressed video such as VC-2 and JPEG-XS which are ultra low latency codecs allowing the video stream to be reduced by half, a quarter or more. As described in this talk the ability to create workflows on a single IP infrastructure seamlessly moving into and out of compressed video is allowing remote production across countries allowing for equipment to be centralised with people and control surfaces elsewhere.

Noted as ‘forthcoming’ by Wes, but having since been published, is RP 2110-23 which adds back in a feature that was lost when migrating from 2022-6 into 2110 – the ability to send a UHD feed as 4x HD feeds. This can be useful to allow for UHD to be used as a production format but for multiviewers to only need to work in HD mode for monitoring. Wes explains the different modes available. The talk finishes by looking at RTP timestamps and SDPs.

Watch now!
The slides for this talk are available here
Speakers

Wes Simpson Wes Simpson
President,
Telecom Product Consulting