Comment by kvm000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kvm000 | Hacker News Reader

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My company is heavily involved in this area... there is a migration underway from baseband (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_digital_interface) to fully IP based infrastructure for routing and signal flow.

With IP, it's usually a software defined network model, along with some IGMP components for controlling video flow.

So the clients (software or control panels) would send a request to the routing orchestration system to request a route to send multicast flows (SMPTE 2110, separate multicast for video, audio streams, ancillary data) from a source to a destination, same as with a baseband router. With IP, the orchestration layer also drives the receiving device to join the multicast explicitly if it isn't IGMP based.

This is our SDN orchestration; https://evertz.com/solutions/magnum

(we're hiring!)

Your employer amongst other dinosaur hardware manufacturers is also making this a nightmare to implement in software because of the tiny packet burst requirements (40us). My team will spend thousands of man hours and our servers will waste huge amounts of energy because power-saving can't be turned off in order to hit these crazy requirements.

In 40 years time we'll be still having to comply with this nonsense because some manufacturers didn't want to update their FPGA designs. It's like fractional frame rates all over again.

This is really where the broadcast industry lost its collective mind.

We also do full systems purely in software at large scale, such as this one; https://evertz.com/resources/press/Discovery-Cloud-Oct2017.P... ... fully virtualized in AWS, not just for OTT but also full linear cable/sat broadcast channels.

There are valid use cases for both hardware solutions where appropriate, and software solutions for other use cases. There are many low latency use cases where crazy requirements are still actual requirements.

Conveniently those requirements exactly matched the buffers of legacy FPGA designs. Funny that.

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