IS-06 Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: NMOS – Ready, Steady, Go!

Posted on 3rd December 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

We have NMOS IS-04,-05, 6, 7…all the way to 10. Is it possibly too complex? Each NMOS specification brings an important feature to an IP/SMPTE ST-2022 workflow and not every system needs each one so life can become confusing. To help, NVIDIA (who own Mellanox) have been developing an open-source project which allows for quick and easy deployment of an NMOS test system.

Kicking off the presentation, Félix Poulin, explains how the EBU Pyramid for Media Nodes shows how SMPTE ST 2110 depends on a host of technologies surrounding it to create a large system. These are such as ‘Discovery and registration; channel mapping, event and tally, Network control, security and more. Félix shows how AMWA’s BCP-003-01 gives guidelines on securing NMOS comms. How IS-09 allows nodes to join the system and collect system parameters and then register itself in the IS-04 database. IS-05 and IS-06 allow end-points to be connected either through IGMP with IS-05 or by an SDN controller, using -06. IS-08 allows for audio mapping/shuffling with BCP-002-01 marking which streams belong to each other and can be taken as a bundle. IS-07 gives a way for event and tally information to be passed from place to place.

There’s a lot going on, already published and getting started can seem quite daunting. For that reason, there is an ‘NMOS at a glance‘ document now on the NMOS website. Gareth Sylvester-Bradley from Sony looks at the ongoing work within NMOS such as finalising IS-10 and BCP-003-02 both of which will enable secure authorisation of clients in the system and explains how AMWA works and ensures the correct direction of the NMOS activity groups with sufficient business cases and participation. He also outlines the importance of the NMOS testing tool and the criteria used for quality and adoption. Gareth finishes by discussing the other in-progress work from NMOS including work on EDID connection management as part of the pro AV IPMX project.

Finally, Richard Hastie introduces the ‘Easy-NMOS’ which provides very easy deployment of IS-04, 05 & 09 along with BCP-003-01 and BCP-002-01. Introduced in 2019, Mellanox – now part of NVIDIA – developed this easy-to-deploy, containerised set of 3 ‘servers’ which quickly and easily deploy these technologies including a test suite. This doesn’t move media, but it creates valid NMOS nodes and includes an MQTT broker. One container contains the NMOS Registry, controller and MQTT broker. One is a virtual mode and the last is an NMOS testing service. Richard walks us through the 4-line install and brief configuration ahead of installing this and demonstrating how to use it.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Félix Poulin Director, Media Transport Architecture & Lab CBC/Radio-Canada
	Gareth Sylvester-Bradley Principal engineer, Sony EPE
	Richard Hastie Senior Sales Director, Mellanox Business Development NVIDIA

Video: Introduction to IPMX

Posted on 24th June 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

The Broadcast Knowledge has documented over 100 videos and webinars on SMPTE ST 2110. It’s a great suite of standards but it’s not always simple to implement. For smaller systems, many of the complications and nuances don’t occur so a lot of the deeper dives into ST 2110 and its associated specifications such as NMOS from AMWA focus on the work done in large systems in tier-1 broadcasters such as the BBC, tpc and FIS Skiing for SVT.

ProAV, the professional end of the AV market, is a different market. Very few companies have a large AV department if one at all. So the ProAV market needs technologies which are much more ‘plug and play’ particularly those in the events side of the market. To date, the ProAV market has been successful in adopting IP technology with quick deployments by using heavily proprietary solutions like ZeeVee, SDVoE and NDI to name a few. These achieve interoperability by having the same software or hardware in each and every implementation.

IPMX aims to change this by bringing together a mix of standards and open specifications: SMPTE ST 2110, NMOS specs and AES. Any individual or company can gain access and develop a service or product to meet them.

Andreas gives a brief history of IP to date outlining how AES67, ST 2110, ST 2059 and the IS specifications, his point being that the work is not yet done. ProAV has needs beyond, though complementary to, those of broadcast.

AES67 is already the answer to a previous interoperability challenge, explains Andreas, as the world of audio over IP was once a purely federated world of proprietary standards which had no, or limited, interoperability. AES67 defined a way to allow these standards to interoperate and has now become the main way audio is moved in SMPTE 2110 under ST 2110-30 (2110-31 allows for AES3). Andreas explains the basics of 2110, AES, as well as the NMOS specifications. He then shows how they fit together in a layered design.

Andreas brings the talk to a close looking at some of the extensions that are needed, he highlights the ability to be more flexible with the quality-bandwidth-latency trade-off. Some ProAV applications require pixel perfection, but some are dictated by lower bandwidth. The current ecosystem, if you include ST 2110-22’s ability to carry JPEG-XS instead of uncompressed video allows only very coarse control of this. HDMI, naturally, is of great importance for ProAV with so many HDMI interfaces in play but also the wide variety of resolutions and framerates that are found outside of broadcast. Work is ongoing to enable HDCP to be carried, suitably encrypted, in these systems. Finally, there is a plan to specify a way to reduce the highly strict PTP requirements.

Watch now!
Speaker

Andreas Hildebrand
Evangelist,
ALC NetworX

Video: What is NMOS? with a Secure Control Case Study

Posted on 15th June 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Once you’ve implemented SMPTE ST 2110‘s suite of standards on your network, you’ve still got all your work ahead of you in order to implement large-scale workflows. How are you doing to discover new devices? How will you make or change connections between devices? How will you associate audios to the video? Creating a functioning system requires an whole ecosystem of control protocols and information exchange which is exactly what AMWA, the Advanced Media Workflow Association has been working on for many years now.

Jed Deame from Nextera introduces the main specifications that have been developed to work hand-in-hand with uncompressed workflows. All prefixed with IS- which stands for ‘Interface Specificaion’, they are IS-04, IS-05, IS-08, IS-09 and IS-10. Between them they allow you to discover new devices, create connections between then, manage the association of audio with video as well as manage system-wide information. Each of these, Jed goes through in turn. The only relevant ones which are skipped are IS-06 which allows devices to communicate northbound to an SDN controller and IS-07 which manages GPI and tally information.

Jed sets the scene by describing an example ST-2110 setup with devices able to join a network, register their presence and be quickly involved in routing events. He then looks at the first specification in today’s talk, NMOS IS-04. IS-04’s job is to provide an API for nodes (cameras, monitors etc.) to use when they start up to talk to a central registry and lodge some details for further communication. The registry contains a GUID for every resource which covers nodes, devices, sources, flows, senders and receivers. IS-04 also provides a query API for controllers (for instance a control panel).

While IS-04 started off very basic, as it’s moved to version 1.4, it’s added HTTPS transport, paged queries and support for connection management with IS-05 and IS-06. IS-04 is a foundational part of the system allowing each element to have an identity, track when entities are changes and update clients accordingly.

IS-05 manages connections between senders and receivers allowing changes to be immediate or set for the future. It allows, for example, querying of a sender to get the multicast settings and provides for sending that to a receiver. Naturally, when a change has been made, it will update the IS-04 registry.

IS-08 helps manage the complexity which is wrought by allowing all audios to flow separately from the video. Whilst this is a boon for flexibility and reduces much unnecessary processing (in extracting and recombining audio) it also adds a burden of tracking which audios should be used where. IS-08 is the answer from AMWA on how to manage this complexity. This can be used in association with BCP-002 (Best Current Practice) which allows for essences in the IS-04 registry to be tagged showing how they were grouped when they were created.

Jed looks next at IS-09 which he explains provides a way for global facts of the system to be distributed to all devices. Examples of this would be whether HTTPS is in use in the facility, syslog servers, the registration server address and NMOS versions supported.

Security is the topic of the last part of talk. As we’ve seen, IS-04 already allows for encrypted API traffic, and this is mandated in the EBU’s TR-1001. However BCP 003 and IS-10 have also been created to improve this further. IS-10 deals with authorisation to make sure that only intended controllers, senders and receivers are allowed access to the system. And it’s the difference between encryption (confidentiality) and authorisation which Jed looks at next.

It’s no accident that security implementations in AMWA specifications shares a lot in common with widely deployed security practices already in use elsewhere. In fact, in security, if you can at all avoid developing your own system, you should avoid it. In use here is the PKI system and TLS encryption we use on every secure website. Jed steppes through how this works and the importance of the cipher suite which lives under TLS.

The final part of this talk is a case study where a customer required encrypted control, an authorisation server, 4K video over 1GbE, essence encryption, unified routing interface and KVM capabilities. Jed explains how this can all be achieved with the existing specifications or an extension non top of them. Extending the encryption methods for the API to essences allowed them to meet the encryption requirements and adding some other calls on top of the existing NMOS provided a unified routing interface which allowed setting modes on equipment.

Watch now!
For more information, download these slides from a SMPTE UK Section meeting on NMOS
Speakers

Jed Deame
CEO,
Nextera Video

Video: Using AMWA IS-06 for Flow Control on Professional Media Networks

Posted on 7th February 2020 by Adam K

In IP networks multicast flow subscription is usually based on a combination of IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) and PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast) protocols. While PIM allows for very efficient delivery of IP multicast data, it doesn’t provide bandwidth control or device authorisation.

To solve these issues on SMPTE ST 2110 professional media networks the NMOS IS-06 specification has been developed. It relies on a Software-Defined Networking, where traffic management application embedded in each single switch or router is replaced by a centralised Network Controller. This controller manages and monitors the whole network environment, making it bandwidth aware.

NMOS IS-06 specification provides a vendor agnostic Northbound interface from Network Controller to Broadcast Controller. IS-06 in conjunction with IS-04 (Discovery and Registration) and IS-05 (NMOS Device Connection Management) allows Broadcast Controller to automatically set up media flows between endpoints on the network, reserve bandwidth for flows and enforce network security. Broadcast Controller is also able to request network topology information from Network Controller, which can be used to create a user friendly graphic representation of the flows in the network.

In this presentation Rob Porter from Sony Europe explains the basics of NMOS IS-06, showing in details how setting up media flows with this specification fits into the IS-04 / IS-05 workflow. Rob emphasise that all AMWA NMOS specifications are completely open and available to anyone, allowing for interoperability between broadcast and network devices from different manufacturers.

The next speaker, Sachin Vishwarupe from Cisco Systems, focuses on the future works on IS-06, including provisioning feedback (such as insufficient bandwidth, no route available from sender to receiver or no management connectivity), flow statistics, security and grouping (similar to ”salvo” in SDI world).

There is also a discussion on extension of IS-06 specification for Network Address Translation (NAT), which would help to resolve problems caused by address conflicts e.g. when sharing resources between facilities.

You can find the slides here.

Watch now!

Speakers