ST 2022-7

Video: ST-2110 – Measuring and Testing the Data, Control and Timing Planes

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

An informal chat touching on the newest work around SMPTE ST-2110 standards and related specifications in today’s video. The industry’s leading projects are now tracking the best practices in IT as much as the latest technology in IP because simply getting video working over the network isn’t enough. Broadcasters demand solutions which are secure from the ground up, easy to deploy and have nuanced options for deployment.

Andy Rayner from Nevion talks to Prin Boon from Phabrix to understand the latest trends. Between then, Andy and Prin account for a lot of activity in standards work within standards and industry bodies such as SMPTE, VSF and JT-NM to name a but a few, so whom better to hear from regarding the latest thinking and ongoing work.

Andy starts by outlining the context of SMPTE’s ST-2110 suite of standards which covers not only the standards within 2110, but also the NMOS specifications from AMWA as well as the timing standards (SMPTE 2059 and IEEE 1588). Prin and Andy both agree that the initial benefit of moving to IT networking was benefiting from the massive network switches which now delivering much higher switching density than SDI ever could or would, now the work of 2110 projects is also tracking IT, rather than simply IP. By benefiting from the best practices of the IT industry as a whole, the broadcast industry is getting a much better product. Andy makes the point that broadcast-uses have very much pushed fabric manufacturers to implement PTP and other network technologies in a much more mature and scalable way than was imagined before.

Link to video

The focus of conversation now moves to the data, control and timing plane. The data plane contains the media essences and all of the ST 21110 standards. Control is about the AMWA/NMOS specs such as the IS-0X specs as well as the security-focused BCP-003 and JT-NM TR-1001. Timing is about PTP and associated guidelines.

Prin explains that in-service test and measurement is there to give a feeling for the health of a system; how close to the edge is the system? This is about early alerting of engineering specialists and then enable deep faultfinding with hand-held 2110 analysers. Phabrix, owned by Leader, are one of a number of companies who are creating monitoring and measurement tools. In doing this Willem Vermost observed that little of the vendor data was aligned so couldn’t be compared. This has directly led to work between many vendors and broadcasters to standardise the reported measurement data in terms of how it’s measured and how it is named and is being standardised under 2110-25. This will cover latency, video timing, margin and RTP offset.

More new work discussed by the duo includes the recommended practice, RP 2059-15 which is related to the the ST 2059 standards which apply PTP to media streams. As PTP, also known as IEEE 1588 has been updated to version 2.1 as part of the 2019 update, this RP creates a unified framework to expose PTP data in a structured manner and relies on RFC 8575 which, itself, relies on the YANG data modeling language.

We also hear about work to ensure that NMOS can fully deal with SMPTE 2022-7 flows in all the cases where a receiver is expecting a single or dual feed. IS-08 corner cases have been addressed and an all-encompassing model to develop against has been created as a reference.

Pleasingly, as this video was released in December, we are treated to a live performance of a festive song on piano and trombone. Whilst this doesn’t progress the 2110 narrative, it is welcomed as a great excuse to have a mine pie.

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Speakers

Andy Rayner Andy Rayner
Chief Technologist,
Nevion
Prinyar Boon Prinyar Boon
Product Manager,
PHABRIX

Video: AES67 over WAN

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Deeply embedded in the audio industry and adopted into SMPTE ST 2110, AES67 workflows surround us. Increasingly our workflows are in multiple locations so moving AES67 on the WAN and the internet is essential. If networks were always perfect, this would be easy but as that’s not the case, this RAVENNA talk examines what the problems are and how to solve them.

Andreas Hildebrand introduces the video with an examination of how the WAN, whether that’s a company’s managed wide area network or the internet at large, is different from a LAN. Typical issues are packet loss, varying latency meaning the packets arrive with jitter, lack of PTP and multicast. With this in mind, Nicolas Sturmel from Merging Technologies takes the reins to examine the solutions.

Nicolas explains the typically EBU Tech 3326 (also known as ACIP) is used for WAN contribution which specifies how a sender and receiver communicate and the codecs to be used. Although PCM is available, many codecs such as AptX are also prescribed for use. Nicolas says that ACIP is great for most applications but if you need low-latency, precise timing and PCM-quality staying AES67 may be the best policy, even over the WAN.

Having identified your AES6-over-WAN workflow, the question is how to pull it off. Nicolas looks at three methods, one is FEC whereby you are constantly sending redundant data. FEC can send up to around 25% extra data so that if any is lost, the extra information sent can be leveraged to determine the lost values and reconstruct the stream. This is can work well but requires sending this extra data constantly therefore putting up your bandwidth. It can also only deal with certain losses requiring them to be of a short duration.

Instead of FEC, you can use RIST, SRT or a similar re-transmission technology. These will actively recover any lost packets and have the benefit that you only transmit more data when you have lost data. Lastly, he mentions SMPTE ST 2022-7 which uses two paths of identical data to cover losses in any one of them. Although this is 100% extra data, the benefit is that it can deal with any type of loss including a complete path failure which neither of the others can do. It is, however possible to combine FEC or RIST with a 2022-7 workflow so you can have two levels of protection.

Timing over the WAN is not ideal as PTP loses accuracy over long-latency links and it assumes symmetry. On the internet, it’s possible to get links where the latency is longer in one direction than the other. An easy, though potentially costly, workaround for distributing PTP over the WAN is to use GPS, GLONASS or similar to synchronise grandmaster clocks at each location.

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Speakers

Nicolas Sturmel Nicolas Sturmel
Product Manager & Senior Technologist
Merging Technologies
Andreas Hildebrand Andreas Hildebrand
RAVENNA Evangelist,
ALCNetworx

Video: Migrating to IP – Top Questions from Broadcasters

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


Moving to IP can be difficult. For some, it’s about knowing where to even start. For others, it’s a matter of understanding some of the details which is the purpose of this talk from Leader US which looks at the top questions that Leader’s heard from its customer base:

  • How do we look at it?
  • How do we test it?
  • How is the data sent?
  • What is PTP?
  • How do we control it?
  • What is NMOS?
  • What are the standards involved?

These questions, and more, are covered in this webinar.

Steve Holmes from Lader Us details the IP relevant basics starting with the motivations: weight, cost, scale, density, and independent essences. We can then move on to the next questions covering RTP itself and how 2022-6 was built upon it. SMPTE ST 2022-6 splits up a regular SDI signal into sections and encapsulates them, uncompressed. This is one big difference from SMPTE ST 2110 where all essences are sent separately. For some, this is not a benefit, but for general broadcast workflows, it can sometimes be tricky getting them into alignment and some workflows are aimed at delivering an incoming bundle of PIDs so being able to separate them is a backward step.

With this groundwork laid, Steve explains how seamless redundancy works with SMPTE 2022-7 going on to then describe the difficulty of keeping jitter low and the importance of sender profiles in ST 2110. Steve finishes this section with a discussion of NMOS specifications such as IS-05 and IS-06. The session ends with a Q&A.

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Speaker

Steve Holmes Steve Holmes
Freelance consultant

Video: Benefits of IP Systems for Sporting Venues

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

As you walk around any exhibitions there seems to be a myriad of ‘benefits’ of IP working, many of which don’t resonate for particular use cases. Only the most extraordinary businesses need all of the benefits, so in this talk, Imagine Communication’s John Mailhot discusses how IP helps sports venues.

John sets the scene by separating out the function of OB trucks and the ‘inside production’ facilities which have a whole host of non-TV production to do including driving scoreboards, displays inside the venue, replays and importantly has to deal with over 250 events a year, not all of which will have an OB truck.

We see that the scale that IP can work at is a great benefit as many signals can fit down one fibre and 2022-7 seamless switching can easily provide full redundancy for every fibre and SFP. This is a level of redundancy which is simply not seen in SDI systems. With stadia being very large, necessitating cable runs of over 500m, the fact that IP needs fewer cables overall is a great benefit.

John shows an example of an Arista switch only 7U in height which provides 144x 100G ports meaning it could support over 4000 inputs and 4000 outputs. Such density is unprecedented and for OB trucks can be a dealbreaker. For sports venues, this can also be a big motivator but also allow more flexibility in distributing the solution rather than relying on a massive central interconnect with a 1100×1100 SDI router in a central CTA.

TV is nothing without audio and the benefits to audio in 2110 are non trivial since with the audio being split off from the video, we are no longer limited to dealing with just 16 channels per video and de-embedding from a video frame any time we want to touch it.

Timing is an interesting benefit. I say this because, whilst PTP can end up being quite complex compared to black and burst, it has some big benefits. First off, it can live in the same cables as your data where as black and burst requires a whole separate cable infrastructure. PTP also allows you to timestamp all essences which helps with lip-sync throughout your workflow.

John leads us through some examples of how this works for different areas finishing by summing up the relevant benefits such as scalability, multi-format, space efficient, and timing amongst others.

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Download the slides
Speakers

John Mailhot John Mailhot
CTO, Networking & Infrastructure,
Imagine Communications