My new job: playing with trains.

I have a new job. It is, alas, only a short consulting/ contract opportunity, a chance to stay involved with the technologies of video encoding and transport while I continue my search for something longer term.

The company I’m assisting with a new product launch, Ambrado, developed highly versatile and compact board-level MPEG-2 encoder and decoder devices that have gone into some well-known, industry-leading products for (mostly) the broadcasting industry. These tiny devices are quite impressive but, as OEM components, require integration at the product design level which can limit their speed of deployment in new products.

To address a larger part of the market Ambrado embedded their technology into two commercial, stand-alone  MPEG-2/ H.264 encoder-decoder “boxes” that anyone can use. The encoder takes in SD or HD-SDI video with embedded or separate digital audio and compresses it into an MPEG transport stream (TS) with either an MPEG-2 or H.264 payload. The TS can be delivered via DVB-ASI and via RTP or UDP over a conventional LAN. The decoder decodes either format and delivers SDI video and AES3 digital audio. The units can be used back-to-back to  move video across networks, or as ingest / delivery devices interoperating with other broadcast gear.

This would not be particularly revolutionary if it wasn’t for a few key characteristics: these things do what they do in a small, 1U half-width portable form factor, they do it at such a low power level that they can run for hours on industry-standard battery packs, they offer marvelously intuitive user experiences (front-panel and web browser) so anyone can set up  and operate them, and they cost less than any comparable units–lots less.

Oh, and there’s one other key characteristic I should explain: they offer great picture quality AND low latency at the same time…lower, apparently, than any other units on the market. Considerably lower. 

Why is latency so important? Anyone involved in live news production will answer that with passion. You’ve seen those live interviews from the field where the news anchor asks a question and the field personality stands there looking awkward for a few seconds, then answers the question. Latency is the cumulative time it takes to capture incoming audio and video, compress it, transport it, decompress it, and display it. It essentially doubles in two-way applications; round-trip delay can be several seconds. In our example, the Anchor’s question gets to the field correspondant  a couple seconds late, and his/her response takes another few seconds to get back to the station.

Reducing those lags is important, it’s nothing less than the Holy Grail in many broadcast applications. We needed to find a way to make this extremely useful feature stand out quickly at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) 2010 show this month. NAB is THE show of the year and pretty much the new product release target for the entire industry. Presence there is essential for a successful product launch.

So what has all this have to do with model trains? Trains can be a great way to showcase picture quality with low latency at low data rates, all at the same time. Here’s the setup: a broadcast-quality live camera focused close-in on a moving train. Show the live video from the camera on a $9,000 studio monitor, feed the video to an Ambrado encoder, transport it over a LAN, decode it with the companion decoder, and display the output on a second, identical monitor. In our demo we intentionally set latency to normal mode and let the observer compare the two side-by-side screens, ooohing and ahhhing over the great picture quality at low data rates. The movement of the train, difficult-to-encode colors (SantaFe Warbonnet Red/Silver and lots of colorful freight cars), and tiny details in artificial trees and other scenery challenge the compression technology. Savvy observers know it is extremely difficult to encode and decode that scene without noticible artifacts and impairments; they marvel and murmer agreeably at the picture quality under those conditions.

Then we turn on Low Latency mode and watch their jaws drop. As the last car goes by (a caboose in our setup) they see the car disappear on both screens nearly simultaneously.

Great picture AND low latency.  A nice win for us.

//Mark