ST 2110-10 Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

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.

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Speaker

Andreas Hildebrand
Evangelist,
ALC NetworX

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
CTO, Networking & Infrastructure,
Imagine Communications

SMPTE ST 2110 is a growing suite of standards detailing uncompressed media transport over networks. Now at 8 documents, it’s far more than just ‘video over IP’. This talk looks at the new ways that video can be transported, dealing with PTP timing, creating ‘SDPs’ and is a thorough look at all the documents.

Building on this talk from Ed Calverley which explains how we can use networks to carry uncompressed video, Wes Simpson goes through all the parts of the ST 2110 suite explaining how they work and interoperate as part of the IP Showcase at NAB 2019.

Wes starts by highlighting the new parts of 2110, namely the overview document which gives a high level overview of all the standard docs, the addition of compressed bit-rate video carriage and the recommended practice document for splitting a single video and sending it over multiple links; both of which are detailed later in the talk.

SMPTE ST 2110 is fundamentally different, as highlighted next, in that it splits up all the separate parts of the signal (i.e. video, audio and metadata) so they can be transferred and processed separately. This is a great advantage in terms of reading metadata without having to ingest large amounts of video meaning that the networking and processing requirements are much lighter than they would otherwise be. However, when essences are separated, putting them back together without any synchronisation issues is tricky.

ST 2110-10 deals with timing and knowing which packets of one essence are associated with packets of another essence at any particular point in time. It does this with PTP, which is detailed in IEEE 1588 and also in SMPTE ST 2059-2. Two standards are needed to make this work because the IEEE defined how to derive and carry timing over the network, SMPTE then detailed how to match the PTP times to phases of media. Wes highlights that care needs to be used when using PTP and AES67 as the audio standard requires specific timing parameters.

The next section moves into the video portion of 2110 dealing with video encapsulation on the networks pixel grouping and the headers needed for the packets. Wes then spends some time walking us through calculating the bitrate of a stream. Whilst for most people using a look-up table of standard formats would suffice, understanding how to calculate the throughput helps develop a very good understanding of the way 2110 is carried on the wire as you have to take note not only of the video itself (4:2:2 10 bit, for instance) but also the pixel groupings, UDP, RTP and IP headers.

Timing of packets on the wire isn’t anything new as it is also important for compressed applications, but it is of similar importance to ensure that packets are sent properly paced on wire. This is to say that if you need to send 10 packets, you send them one at a time with equal time between them, not all at once right next to each other. Such ‘micro bursting’ can cause problems not only for the receiver which then needs to use more buffers, but also when mixed with other streams on the network it can affect the efficiency of the routers and switches leading to jitter and possibly dropped packets. 2110-21 sets standards to govern the timing of network pacing for all of the 2110 suite.

Referring back to his warning earlier regarding timing and AES67, Wes now goes into detail on the 2110-30 standard which describes the use of audio for these uncompressed workflows. He explains how the sample rates and packet times relate to the ability to carry multiple audios with some configurations allowing 64 audios in one stream rather than the typical 8.

‘Essences’, rather than media, is a word often heard when talking about 2110. This is an acknowledgement that metadata is just as important as the media described in 2110. It’s sent separately as described by 2110-40. Wes explains the way captions/subtitles, ad triggers, timecode and more can be encapsulated in the stream as ancillary ‘ANC’ packets.

2110-22 is an exciting new addition as this enables the use of compressed video such as VC-2 and JPEG-XS which are ultra low latency codecs allowing the video stream to be reduced by half, a quarter or more. As described in this talk the ability to create workflows on a single IP infrastructure seamlessly moving into and out of compressed video is allowing remote production across countries allowing for equipment to be centralised with people and control surfaces elsewhere.

Noted as ‘forthcoming’ by Wes, but having since been published, is RP 2110-23 which adds back in a feature that was lost when migrating from 2022-6 into 2110 – the ability to send a UHD feed as 4x HD feeds. This can be useful to allow for UHD to be used as a production format but for multiviewers to only need to work in HD mode for monitoring. Wes explains the different modes available. The talk finishes by looking at RTP timestamps and SDPs.

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The slides for this talk are available here
Speakers