Canadian public service broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada, one of the trail-blazers of ST-2110-based IP production technology, has decided to contribute to the development of the EBU Live IP Toolkit (LIST), a suite of tools designed to measure and inspect Live IP traffic.
The broadcaster is on track to bring its new all-IP facility on the air in 2020 and will be relying on LIST to help its engineers trouble-shoot and optimize the network in the last phases of implementation.
Having chosen the emerging SMPTE ST 2110 standard as a long-term investment and hedge against vendor lock-in, the broadcaster faced a steep learning curve. But it also allowed the organization’s staff to build up expert knowledge and gave it a clear understanding of its own requirements and the needs on the ground.
“We always need two things”, says CBC/Radio-Canada Engineering Lab Director Felix Poulin. “We need evaluations of recent SMPTE ST-2110-based equipment and its compliance with all relevant standards. And we need tools that allow us to look into the network and individual streams so we can understand the traffic, isolate issues and manage the infrastructure.”
New features
The EBU-developed LIST suite of tools allows CBC to do both. Realizing there was a lack of mature and user-friendly tools in the market, CBC decided to contribute to the development of LIST. Thanks to the collaboration the feature set has since expanded to include:
- support for ST 2110-40 ancillary data streams
- audio jitter and delay measurements with the Time Stamp Delay Factor (TS-DF as defined in EBU Tech 3337)
- improved reading schedule (VRX, CINST, TROffset)
- incorporated capture with precise time stamping
- Session Description (SDP) checking
With these features on board, LIST now gives users testing possibilities that aren’t currently available in this form in any other solution on the market. And all this in a package that is fully open-source and transparent. This makes LIST a perfect testing tool for international interoperability events.
The feature set of LIST is likely to grow as further EBU Members contribute resources and ideas, turning LIST into a crowd-developed solution that does more than fill a gap – a fully featured suite made by professionals for professionals.