Video: Broadcast Channel Origination as a Service: from Concept to Operational Implementation

Playout out entire channels from the cloud helps to decrease the number of ingress and egress points to/from the cloud is a general way of maximising the value of cloud workflows.

This talk from the 2018 SMPTE conference is a case study of putting PBS channel origination in the cloud. John McCoskey starts by explaining the motivations and context prompting this move to the cloud – not least of these was Discovery’s move putting nearly all its channels in the cloud globally.

Ron Clifton then takes us through the typical system diagram for a channel both the traditional system and how that changes when implemented in the cloud. He discusses the technical abilities of what they have built including additional benefits and then goes on to discuss the PoC.

An interesting slide is Ron’s comparison of Cloud Connectivity Options where he compares the pros and cons (cost, jitter, security etc.) of the various types of connectivity into the cloud. This shows the trade offs – effectively business decisions – that need to be made when deploying.

The Q&A covers reliability of public cloud internal networks, frame accurate switching, latency, ASTC gateway locations, geo-diversity, systems monitoring and others.

Watch now!

Speakers

John McCoskey John McCoskey
Former Industry Lead Executive,
Eagle Hill Consulting
Ron Clifton Ron Clifton
President & Founder,
CliftonGroup

Video: Live Closed Captioning and Subtitling in SMPTE 2110-40

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

In this video, Bill McLaughlin introduces 2110-40 and shows its advantages for closed captioning. With video, audio and ancillary data broken into separate essence flows, you no longer need full SDI bandwidth to process closed captioning and transcription can be done by subscribing to a single audio stream which bandwith is less than 1 Mbps. That allows for a very high processing density, with up to 100 channels of closed captioning in 1 RU server.

Another benefit is that a single ST 2110-40 multicast containing closed captioning can be associated with multiple videos (e.g. for two different networks or dirty and clean feeds), typically using NMOS connection management. This translates into additional bandwidth savings and lower cost, as you don’t need separate CC/Subtitling encoders working in SDI domain.

Test and measurment equipment for ST 2110-40 is still under developmnent. However, with date rates of 50-100 kbps per flow monitoring is very managable and you can use COTS equipment and generic packet analyser like Wireshark with dissector available on Github.

Speaker

Bill McLaughlin
VP Product Development
EEG Enterprises

Video: JPEG-XS and ST 2110

JPEG XS is a brand-new, ultra-low latency standard delivering JPEG 2000 quality with 1000x lower latency; microseconds instead of milliseconds. This mezzanine compression standard promises compression ratios of up to 10:1, resolutions of up to 8K plus HDR and features frame rates from 24 to 120 fps.

Jean-Baptiste Lorent from intoPIX shows how JPEG-XS can be used with SMPTE ST-2110 stack. Part -22 of ST 2110 allows for transport of compressed video essence as an alternative to uncompressed essence – all the other elementary streams stay the same, just the video RTP payload changes. This approach saves a lot of bandwidth and keeps all the existing advantages of moving from SDI to IP at the same time.

Based on TICO which arrived in products four or more years ago allowing HD products to support UHD workflows, JPEG XS was also designed for visually lossless quality and maintaining that quality over multiple re-encoding stages. The combination of very-low microsecond-latency and relatively low bandwidth makes it ideal for remote production of live events.

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Speaker

Jean-Baptiste Lorent Jean-Baptiste Lorent
Director Marketing & Sales
intoPIX

Video: Analysis of emerging video codecs: coding tools, compression efficiency and complexity

There continues to be fervent activity in codec development and it’s widely expected that there won’t be a single successor to AVC (h.264). Vying for one of the spots is AV1 but also MPEG’s VVC.

In this talk at SMPTE 2018, Julien Le Tanou from MediaKind compares the coding tools used by VVC and AV1 and explains the methodology he uses to compare the two codecs. We see the increase in decoding time compared to HEVC required for VVC as well as the famously slow AV1. We also see the bitrate savings with VVC performing better.

Julien also presents subjective results which are not correlated to the objective results and explains reasons for this.

Speakers

Julien Le Tanou Julien Le Tanou
Senior Engineer, Video Compression,
MediaKind