This article is part of our growing series on Standards. There is an overview of all 26 articles in Part 1 -  An Introduction To Standards.

ST 2110 facilitates the transport of live streams of media content around a broadcast production environment as a replacement for SDI cabling and to enable entirely new production workflows.

ST 2110 is targeted at that part of a broadcast production architecture that needs to send and receive live video feeds. These often come from external sources such as sports, entertainment or news events. Outgoing feeds from playout systems are delivered to distribution outlets. The quality of the content is paramount. Available network bandwidth should not be a limiting factor. Streaming services operate under a different regime where video quality may be compressed to a lower quality so it can work within a limited network capacity.

This time we examine the individual parts of ST 2110 that are currently available. There isn't sufficient space to delve deeply into them all but an overview will cover the more important characteristics. We will come back to deal with them individually later on.

There Are Lots Of Moving Parts

A search for information about ST 2110 reveals many articles that were published immediately after it was introduced in 2017. That early material focuses on the original four core parts of the standard. This was a starting point and some observers suggested the standard was incomplete at that time. From the perspective of 2017, that may be a fair comment because they could not predict how things would evolve over the next 7 years. The situation is quite different now with many additional parts now available:

SMPTE standards are generally free of any patent encumbrance. That is not to say there are no patents involved, but they are very rare compared with ISO and MPEG standards for example.

Useful Standards From Other Organisations

SMPTE manages many other standards that we also need. Other organisations such as AMWA look after NMOS which supplements ST 2110. Precise timing is based on work by IEEE and ISO contributes MPEG and JPEG based video coding tools. Additional help comes from the EBU, IETF and W3C.

Standards bodies don't compete with each other. In fact, they collaborate very closely and share their expertise through liaisons at the working group level. Each standards body has a unique pool of experienced engineers and scientists who specialise in a particular area.

The Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS) add discoverability, registering of devices, connection and metadata management within the ST 2110 network.

The video and audio formats are not hardwired. Different image sizes and frame-rates including HD and UHD can be supported.

Part 22 describes how to use other video codecs to compress the media. Part 31 supports arbitrary compressed audio formats carried as AES-3 data payloads.

Separated Elementary Streams

The ST 2110 standard mandates that all the elementary streams are de-embedded and delivered individually. This is useful within a production environment. The content is assembled into RTP packets that are time-stamped and synchronised to a precise system-wide clock.

Each stream is delivered to a different IP address. Arguably, this is very wasteful of IP addresses which may be at a premium depending on your sub-net class. They might also need to be mapped to the same physical destination hardware device which may be awkward when using DNS.

Transport Protocol

The networking uses the IETF Real Time Transport Protocol (RTP) with the packets delivered via UDP. The UDP protocol reduces latency because there is no buffering. TCP would be unsuitable in this context. There is no handshake protocol with UDP, so dropped or out of sequence packets might be lost.

OV 2110-0 - Overview

Consult the overview document to see the ST 2110 architectural design. It describes the provenance of the standards you need to use:

• ST 2110 parts.
• Other SMPTE standards.
• Standards from other organisations.

The latest version was released in 2018 and needs to be revised to cover the new parts.

ST 2110-10 - System Timing And Definitions

When converting an SDI stream to ST 2110 IP, time stamps are derived from the frame information in the original source SDI feed and stored in each packet transmitted in the elementary streams. The streams might travel by different routes that have different latency.

Synchronisation of the incoming streams happens at the receiver and PTP ensures that the streams are synchronised regardless of which route was used. Late packet arrivals would imply that the minimum latency is governed by the slowest traffic. PTP would reassemble the packets into the correct sequence but the sequence as a whole might run late.

The Joint Taskforce on Network Media (JTNM) suggests these key criteria are important:

• Accurate timing and synchronisation within a single site is mandatory.
• Provided an incoming feed from an external source can be re-synchronised to the reference clock the individual sites do not need to be so closely time-locked with each other.

ST 2110-20 - Uncompressed Active Video

Part 20 is based on these VSF technical recommendations:

The latency depends on how much work is required to convert the incoming source into the elementary streams and unpacking it at the receiver. Audio and Ancillary data are delivered separately.

ST 2110-21 - Traffic Shaping And Delivery Timing For Video

Traffic shaping is important for managing the available bandwidth where multiple elementary streams are delivered via the same route. Massive bursts of packets could overwhelm a receiver or saturate the available network bandwidth. Wide Area Networks are also prone to Jitter which can affect the PTP resilience.

Part 21 also describes the SDP parameters that signal the timing properties of each RTP stream. there are two alternative scenarios:

• Network Compatibility Model - The network will cope with many streams without overflowing the switch buffers or queues.
• Virtual Receiver Buffer Model - The sequence of packets will not underflow nor overflow receiver buffers.

The RTP stream senders are defined as one of three basic types. The narrow senders adhere to a more accurate timing resolution and tend to be hardware based. Wide senders are software driven.

The receivers are designed to handle bursts of packets in different ways. This will reduce the jitter that could disrupt the PTP:

ST 2110-22 - Constant Bit-rate Compressed Video

Originally ST 2110 only supported the uncompressed video described in part 20. Part 22 adds constant bit-rate compressed video using one of the registered codecs. Other acceptably fast codecs may be registered in due course:

• VC-2 (AKA Dirac).
• JPEG-XS.

The compressed output is lossy but visually undamaged. The losses are small enough that chroma-keying is unaffected. These are fast codecs with a coding latency of less than 1mS. This is equivalent to just a few lines of video. The compression ratio and hence the reduced network bandwidth depend on the complexity of the content. VC-2 has quoted a compression ratio better than 5:1 and JPEG-XS might be between 10:1 and 20:1.

If these compression ratios are achievable, then it resolves one of the major bandwidth limitation criticisms levelled at the circa 2017 (four-part) ST 2110 design.

The latency needs for ST 2110 probably rule out using AVC and HEVC codecs due to the time it takes to compress video with them. With advanced hardware solutions, you may be able to reduce their latency to an acceptable level.

RP 2110-23 - Uncompressed Active Parallel Video

Part 23 extends part 20 to describe how to split a high-bandwidth video stream into multiple lower bandwidth streams. This is similar to how a high speed 'Supermotion' camera operates. The output streams have lower frame-rates and are created according to several different interleaving decompositions. The same net amount of data is moved via several alternative routes.

These points are addressed:

• Several alternative decomposition methods.
• Grouping of multiple streams.
• Signalling the stream availability.
• SDP declarations.
• Addressing conventions.
• RTP time-stamping constraints.

The receiver composes the frames from the incoming streams to recreate the footage at the original frame-rate.

Note that this only works with uncompressed streams. It would be impractical to use this with previously compressed video streams.

RP 2110-24 - Special Considerations For SD Video

Part 24 refines the definition of the pixel sampling in a line of Standard Definition (SD) video in the source material. It accounts for the following:

Part 20 should be reviewed before studying this document as it relates to the formatting of the line-by-line video content into RTP packets.

RP 2110-25 - Measurement Practices

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has contributed testing protocols to facilitate the integration of systems from different manufacturers. Use these protocols to monitor and analyze the traffic to indicate failures. This is particularly helpful when analyzing how the content is buffered.

Part 25 describes this EBU research and provides insights about the internal structures and processes within ST 2110. It also provides example code.

Probing tools must not disturb or slow down the flow of the network packets.

ST 2110-30 - PCM Digital Audio

• The number of supported channels can range from 1 to 64 depending on the timing of the packets and the sample rate. SDI can only accommodate 16 channels.
• A default sample-rate of 48 kHz is mandated. The only other alternatives are 44.1kHz and 96kHz.
• Sample sizes of 16 or 24 bits are supported.
• A packet time of 1mS or 125µS is allowed.
• Packet time and sample-rate determine how many channels can be carried.

ST 2110-31 - AES-3 Transparent Transport

Note that you may need to deploy hardware coding in order to reduce the latency sufficiently to use MP3, AAC and HE-AAC codecs for the audio.

ST 2110-40 - Transport Of Ancillary Data (Conforming To ST 291-1)

• Closed captioning.
• Subtitles.
• Timecode.
• Metadata.
• Slate information.
• Teletext.
• Copy prevention signals.
• Vertical Interval Test Signals.

There are two parts of the ST 291 standard:

Vertical blanking is organised as lines of TV signals carrying a variety of test and other data. It is located before and after the active-image area. A safe area reserves some lines for special purposes. Vertical blanking does not include the horizontal blanking time which is located at the start of all lines whether they are visible or not.

Any audio found in the HANC area will be delivered according to Part 30. The remaining ancillary data will be delivered in the part 40 ANC stream. If there is no ancillary data to send, an empty 'keep-alive' heartbeat packet will be transmitted at least once for every field frame or segment. ANC packets should be transmitted within 1mS of the data appearing in the SDI feed.

ST 2110-41 - Faster Metadata eXpress (FMX) Transport

• Allows more sophisticated metadata schemas than SDI.
• Supports larger amounts of metadata than SDI.
• Single level of encapsulation.
• Uses a Key-Length-Value (KLV) packaging model.
• Extensible beyond what we currently think we need.
• More easily parsed.
• Can be delivered independently of an elementary stream.
• Can be synchronised with the system clock more easily.
• Payload can be encoded as XML, JSON or any other format.
• More efficient use of IP address space.

ST 2110-42 - Fast Metadata eXpress (FMX) Payload Format

Part 42 was intended to describe the object data format and parameter values being carried by the FMX transport defined in part 41. For example, these metadata items have been suggested:

According to the quarterly reports from SMPTE, this document was hibernated after the draft was completed. The eventual release strategy has not been publicised.

ST 2110-43 - Timed Text Mark-up Language

Conclusion

It is important to keep an open mind and use the standards pragmatically where they are best suited to your architectural design. You don't need to implement all of ST 2110, nor should you exclude standards from other organisations.

You should be able to cherry-pick the best solutions. In 2018, the BBC R&D engineers suggested that a hybrid approach was called for when you need to interoperate with cloud-based systems.

Media identification, timing and synchronisation data needs to be preserved when content is moved outside of an ST 2110 environment and reliably restored when it is brought back in. This is no different to any other integration scenario where information loss is always undesirable.

Although there is a lot of helpful information on the Internet. Be wary of taking everything at face value. A lot of ST 2110 coverage was written when it was first introduced and less complete than it is now. Always refer back to the latest editions of the original source standards documents as an authoritative source. Wikipedia is also very reliable. It depends on industry experts to bring it up to date. Their time is precious and updates can take a little while before they are edited in. Try and check your research against several sources. That often reveals the missing information that is not present in the others.

Obtaining the SMPTE standards has become much easier lately. The standards documents can be downloaded free of charge if you are a member. Joining is very simple and the cost of membership is equivalent to purchasing several standards as a non-member. Obtain all the SMPTE standards you need for the price of a single year's membership.

These Appendix articles contain additional information you may find useful: