Quality Control is one of the many areas where IT and broadcast use similar terms, but the meaning is quite different. Whereas IT focuses on guaranteeing bit rates and packet delivery to improve quality of service and hence quality of experience, video and audio quality is based on satisfying the demands of the human visual and auditory systems. In this article, we investigate how we quantify and measure video and audio streams.
_460_289_70.jpg "The IP media network puzzle remains uncompleted, but an endpoint may be in sight.")
Many engineers believed that the release of SMPTE2110 was sufficient to ensure compatibility for all the gear in a media IP-centric environment. Not so, the standard defines the transport layer only. Complying with ST2110 will only guarantee a signal will pass through a compliant network and can be decoded by a compliant device. It doesn’t specify the IP addressing schemes, multicasting schemes, codec types, bit rates, formats, etc. Currently, all these parameters for each device must be manually configured, making automation difficult. Enter NMOS.
The bewildering number of video and audio compression formats available is difficult for those new to the industry to come to terms with. For broadcast engineers and IT engineers to work effectively together, IT engineers must understand the formats used, the legacy systems still in place, and the reasoning behind their existence. In this article, from the series Broadcast for IT, we investigate compression formats.
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Point to point connections dedicated to delivering video and audio signals have dominated the broadcast industry since the 1930’s. But migrating to IP is compelling engineers to think differently about packetized signal distribution. In this article we investigate the potential sources of congestion and the effects of buffering.
Millions of dollars of savings are being achieved as broadcasters continue to switch from expensive satellite ad-hoc contribution to the public internet. Reliability, low latency, and high-quality connectivity has been difficult to achieve and wrapped in secrecy as vendors locked broadcasters into proprietary software and centralized server systems.
To deliver efficient media solutions IT engineers must be able to communicate effectively with broadcast engineers. In this series of articles, we present the most important topics in broadcasting that IT engineers must understand. Here, we look at compression, why, and how we use it.
The term, “metadata” may be one of the most misunderstood terms in the video business. It is often defined as, “data about data.” Even that phrase does not encompass the real value of metadata when it is combined with the latest production technology.
There’s been a lot of talk about the resource efficiencies related to remote operations for live production, but the cost of bandwidth to connect all of the disparate locations continues to make this way of working prohibitive for most second-tier producers.
