IS-09

Video: NMOS – Ready, Steady, Go!

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

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

Posted on 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 Jed Deame
CEO,
Nextera Video

Video: What’s New in NMOS? – A Tutorial on the Latest in Video over IP Control and Security

Posted on by Adam K

The Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS) have been developed to provide a control and management layer along side the SMPTE ST 2110 transport layer. The idea behind NMOS was to deliver an open specification to provide the software layers that abstract a lot of complexities of ST 2110 and make it easy to interface with any control system.

The NMOS family of specifications began with projects for Discovery & Registration, Device Connection Management and Network Control, but has grown to include many other important subjects such as Event & Tally, Audio Channel Mapping and Interoperable Security.

In this video, Jed Deame discusses the latest advancements including IS-08, IS-09, BCP-002, BCP-003 and IS-10. These additions allows NMOS to surpass the level of control provided in SDI while also adding a layer of security.

The following Interface Specifications and Best Current Practices are presented:

  • IS-04 (Registration and Discovery) – new features: support for GPI over Ethernet (IS-07) and authorisation signalling for security layers BCP-003-02
  • IS-05 (Connection Management) – new features: MQ Telemetry Transport and WebSocket Transport, support for supplementary externally defined parameters
  • IS-08 (Audio Mapping) – audio routing / shuffling facility
  • IS-09 (System Resources) – System ID, server priority, security with HTTPS support, advertisement of system resources such as RDS (Registration and Discovery Server)
  • BCP-002 (Grouping) – uses tag resources in IS-04 in order to achieve a natural groups of senders and receivers (e.g. to tie audio, video and metadata)
  • BCP-003-01 (Security) – uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) in order to encrypt communications between API servers and their clients
  • BCP-003-02 (Security) – covers client authorization for the NMOS APIs
  • IS-10 (Authorisation API) – accompanies the BCP-003-02 specification to restrict what users are authorized to change in an NMOS system (core technologies: PKI, HTTPS, REST, JSON, Oauth 2.0 and JWT)

The presentation finishes with the customer case study – secure KVM all over an IP network.

You can download the slides from here.

Watch now!

You might also be interested in the following videos we have published on The Broadcast Knowledge:

Speaker

Jed Deame
CEO
Nextera Video