NMOS Archives – Page 2 of 8 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Bringing you discovery, registration, control, audio remapping, security and more, the open NMOS specifications from AMWA make using SMPTE’s ST 2110 practical. Most importantly, it makes using 2110 open meaning that different equipment can co-exist in the same ecosystem without being many different drivers being written to translate between each vendor.

Led by Wes Simpson this video talks about implementing NMOS from the perspective of a user, not a vendor with Willem Vermost> from Belgium’s public broadcaster, VRT. One drawback of IP-based solutions, they say early on, is that there are so many options on how to deploy. This potential choice paralysis goes hand in hand with trying to adapt to the new possibilities which come with the technologies. For instance, identifies Willem, says engineers need to adapt their thinking just to design differently knowing that, now, multiple signals can now flow in both directions down a cable. It’s not like SDI’s point to point, unidirectional nature.

Any large plant can get busy with thousands of signals. The question is how to control this massive number of streams; not forgetting that in 2110, an SDI video stream is split up into at least 4 streams. To help put this into perspective, Willem looks back to the original telephone exchange and considers the different workflows there, They work, certainly, but having people present plugging in each individual call doesn’t scale well. In our IP world, we want to get beyond the need to ‘type in an address’ as we want to capture the ease at which cameras are connected

The telephone exchanges worked well but in the early days, there were many exchange manufacturers which, when calling from Berlin to New York all had to work. Willem suggests this is why telecoms acted upon what the broadcast industry is now learning. The last point in this analogy is the need to stop your links between exchanges from becoming over-subscribed. This task is one which NMOS can also be used to deal with, using IS-05.

NMOS is fully available on GitHub and whilst you can take that software and modify it to your needs, Willem says it’s important to maintain interoperability between vendor implementations which is why the JT-NM Tested programme exists to ensure that it’s easy to buy on the market solutions which say they support NMOS and when they do, that it works. Getting an NMOS test system is easy with open projects from Siny and NVIDIA which are ready for deployment.

Willem ends his talk by saying that ST 2110 is easier now than it was, including a recent experience when the en/decoder worked ‘out of the box’. He then answers the question “How do I start out?” Saying you should try something small first, perhaps even an island project. Once you have done that, gained the experience and the concepts, you can take it from there.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Willem Vermost Design & Engineering Manager, VRT
	Wes Simpson Owner, LearnIPVideo.com

Let’s face it, SMPTE ST 2110 isn’t trivial to get up and running at scale. It carries audio as AES67, though with some restrictions which can cause problems for full interoperability with non-2110 AES67 systems. But once all of this is up and running, you’re still lacking discoverability, control and management. These aspects are covered by AMWA’s NMOS IS-04, IS-05 and IS0-08 projects.

Andreas Hildrebrand, Evangelist at ALX NetworX, takes the stand at the AES exhibition to explain how this can all work together. He starts reiterating one of the main benefits of the move to 2110 over 2022-6, namely that audio devices don’t need to receive and de-embed audio. With a dependency on PTP, SMPTE ST 2110-30 an -31 define carriage of AES67 and AES3.

We take a look at IS-04 and IS-05 which define registration, discovery and configuration. Using an address received from DHCP, usually, new devices on the network will put in an entry into an IS-04 registry which can be queried by an API to find out what senders and listeners are available in a system. IS-05 can then use this information to create connections between devices. IS-05, Andreas explains, is able to issue a create connection request to endpoints asking them to connect. It’s up to the endpoints themselves to initiate the request as appropriate.

Once a connection has been made, there remains the problem of dealing with audio mapping. Andreas uses the example of a single stream containing multiple channels. Where a device only needs to use one or two of these, IS-08 can be used to tell the receiver which audio it should be decoding. This is ideal when delivering audio to a speaker. Andreas then walks us through worked examples.

Watch now!
Speaker

Andreas Hildebrand
Ravenna Technology Evangelist,
ALC NetworX

Is SMPTE ST 2110 suitable for inter-site connectivity over the WAN? ST 2110 is moving past the early adopter phase with more and more installations and OB vans bringing 2110 into daily use but today, each site works independently. What if we could maintain a 2110 environment between sites. There are a number of challenges still to be overcome and moving a large number of essence flows long distances and between PTP time domains is one of them.

Nevion’s Andy Rayner is chair of the VSF Activity Group looking into transporting SMPTE ST 2110 over WAN and is here to give an update on the work in progress which started 18 months ago. The presentation looks at how to move media between locations which has been the primary focus to date. It then discusses how control over which media are shared will be handled as this is a new aspect to the work. Andy starts by outlining the protection offered in the scheme which supports both 2022-7 and FEC then explains that though FEC is valuable for single links where 2022-7 isn’t viable, only some of the possible ST 2022-5 FEC configurations are supported, in part, to keep latency low.

The headline to carrying 2110 over the WAN is that it will be done over a trunk. GRE is a widely used Cisco trunking technology. Trunking, also known as tunnelling, is a technique of carrying ‘private’ traffic over a network such that a device sending into the trunk doesn’t see any of the infrastructures between the entrance and the exit. It allows, for instance, IPv6 traffic to be carried over IPv4 equipment where the v4 equipment has no idea about the v6 data since it’s been wrapped in a v4 envelope. Similarly, the ipv6 equipment has no idea that the ipv6 data is being wrapped and carried by routers which don’t understand ipv6 since the wrapping and unwrapping of the data is done transparently at the handoff.

In the context of SMPTE ST 2110, a trunk allows one port to be used to create a single connection to the destination, yet carry many individual media streams within. This has the big benefit of simplifying the inter-site connectivity at the IT level, but importantly also means that the single connection is quite high bandwidth. When FEC is applied to a connection, the latency introduced increases as the bit rate reduces. Since ST 2110 carries audio and metadata separately, an FEC-protected stream would have variable latency depending on the type of the of traffic. Bundling them in to one large data stream allows FEC to be applied once and all traffic then suffers the same latency increase. The third reason is to ensure all essences take the same network path. If each connection was separate, it would be possible for some to be routed on a physically different route and therefore be subject to a different latency.

Entering the last part of the talk, Andy switches gears to talk about how site A can control streams in site B. The answer is that it doesn’t ‘control’, rather there is the concept of requesting streams. Site A will declare what is available and site B can state what it would like to connect to and when. In response, site A can accept and promise to have those sources available to the WAN interface at the right time. When the time is right, they are released over the WAN. This protects the WAN connectivity from being filled with media which isn’t actually being used. These exchanges are mediated and carried out with NMOS IS-04 an IS-05.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Andy Rayner Chief Technologist, Nevion, Chair, WAN IP Activity Group, VSF
	Moderator: Wes Simpson Founder, LearnIPVideo.com Co-chair RIST Activity Group, VSF

NMOS is the open standard for multiple vendors co-operating on a broadcaster network, particularly ST 2110, to announce new devices and configure them. Acting as both a database but also a way of easily describing settings to be shared between systems. Often new ST 2110 systems are specified to be NMOS IS-04 and IS-05 capable.

NMOS IS-04 is the name of the specification which defines the discovery and registration of devices while IS-05 describes the control of said devices. It’s very hard to run a SMPTE ST 2110 system without these or a proprietary protocol which exchanges the same information. It’s not practical to manage any of these tasks at anything more than the smallest scale.

John Mailhot from Imagine Communications delivers a concise summary of these technologies which may be new to you. He explains that an SDP will be generated and John reviews how you would read them. John explains that the stack is open source with the aim of promoting interoperability.

John takes the time needed to look at IS-04 and IS-05 in terms of practically implementing it at the end of this short talk.

Watch now!
Speaker