28 Preview Issue theibcdaily Control yourselves
Broadcasters and playout providers face similar issues in an on-air environment and the solution is right in front of them, suggests Roddy Pratt, technical director, Rascular
You may not have heard of Rascular, in fact there’s quite a good chance that you haven’t, despite the fact that we have over 150 customers – including BSkyB, Discovery Communications Europe, Red Bee Media and ARD. If you’re reading this then that has now already changed; we hope to make this the case for many across the industry at IBC2012. So who are we, and more importantly, what problem(s) do we solve for broadcasters and playout providers? Recently, while having a post- dinner drink with a friend at his house, he asked me a very similar question: what is it that you actually do? This person has no connection with the broadcast industry whatsoever. So I started by explaining that our flagship software product, Helm, allows broadcasters to select
Opinion
best-of-breed … and even by this stage his eyes had started to glaze over. So I looked around his
living room. He’s someone who likes technology; likes to buy the best that he can afford, regardless of manufacturer, and also doesn’t like to throw things away – he still has a video recorder sat on a shelf, and on the living room table I counted eight remote controls, many of them festooned with buttons, all different shapes and sizes. How many functions do you actually use on each of them, I asked. He replied that he maybe used four or five buttons on each. What about using a universal remote control? Well, he said, he’d
looked but the theory was far better than the practice. He looked glum.
The issue that broadcasters and playout providers face in an on-air environment is very similar, though the solution is available. Customers want to be able to buy best-of-breed devices from multiple manufacturers, be that branding technology, routers, video servers, VTRs, multi- image display processors and modular gear, or any combination thereof. But this means – despite the often best intentions of the manufacturers – a huge range of control and monitoring interfaces and masses of functionality that in reality will never be used. This leads to a consequent inability for operators to move quickly between channels to problem solve or access a particular function, never mind a complex workflow.
Roddy Pratt: ‘best-of-breed devices’
And this brings us to the solution that Rascular provides: Helm. This is a powerful, user-customisable, PC-based soft panel control and monitoring system for on- air broadcast applications. It provides operators with access to – and monitoring of – best- of-breed third-party devices typically found in broadcast facilities (all those listed above) and allows operators to set up single-button access to complex workflows. Helm is easily configured to monitor and control
broadcast technologies for many different applications; it’s Windows-based and uses a simple drag-and-drop designer to build panels. Helm is designed to be operated by either touchscreen or keyboard and mouse, and is fully scalable from single channel to complex multi-channel environments.
Of course, I explained this to my friend with a little less terminology and he got the benefits. We think you will too. 8B38a
PCI Express network card DekTec By Heather McLean
Netherlands-based digital TV specialist, DekTec, has released the DTA-2162, a low-profile PCI Express network card with two gigabit Ethernet ports that it will be demonstrating at IBC2012 in Amsterdam. The card contains special
hardware for jitter-free streaming and for receiving
numerous time-stamped transport streams over IP. Error correction and fail-over functions are supported to achieve high availability. Drivers are available for Linux and Windows. Professional infrastructure
for creating digital television is increasingly based on PC servers and IP networks. For reliable realtime
transmission of DTV streams over IP, packet bursts and monitoring of jitter are
crucial. The DTA-2162 is equipped with a hardware engine targeted for these tasks. The software application just needs to write the stream data and the hardware takes care of optimal scheduling. On the receiving side, the
hardware monitors IP jitter on each of the incoming streams. Another piece of hardware support is the address matcher, which works for IP v4 and IP v6.
This offloads the driver of running a search algorithm for each IP packet that enters the system. Forward error correction is supported, too, so that missing IP packets can be reconstructed, increasing the reliability and QoS of the entire system.
The driver integrates seamlessly with the standard network drivers available on Windows and Linux. The special hardware
support for DTV streaming is accessed through DekTec’s DTAPI. This API is supported for all DekTec streamer cards, which means that if an application works with an ASI output card, the same application can stream the data over IP. Some minor changes will be required like selecting the IP destination address, but the streaming source code can remain exactly the same for ASI and IP. 2.B40
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