Aquila Live Streaming Datasheet.pdf
![Image13] ![Image18] ![Image16] ![Image15]
![Image15]
Aquila Live Streaming
Premium video compression
Aquila Live Streaming is the latest solution from MediaKind for streaming compression headends, and is built on over 25 years heritage in providing such solutions. It is based around MediaKind’s software encoder for streaming applications. It also includes MediaKind's packager, and origin server.
- Wide player and device support for all major segment and manifest formats (HLS, SS, DASH, CMAF)
- The minimum bit-rate required whilst maintaining picture quality whether using MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC or HEVC
- SD, HD, 1080P or UHD services, including support for High Dynamic Range
- Rich subtitles management including ingest of DVB subtitles, teletext and closed caption and their translations for each format
- Wide audio codec support
Single solution for all infrastructures
As operating a video headend is not the same for all, Aquila Live Streaming can be deployed in different ways:
- Deployed either on:
- MediaKind reference hardware
- Dedicated data center hardware
- Private Cloud infrastructure
- Public Cloud deployment
Through integral industry and technology partner integrations, Aquila Live Streaming provides a complete content delivery solution.
Aquila Live Streaming from MediaKind is a streaming headend solution which enables streamers and IPTV to minimize costs whilst maintaining user experience. It can also help improve operational efficiency, and provides a straightforward evolutionary path to all IP workflows, and deployment in private and public cloud.
Video compression performance
MediaKind’s video algorithm team continually strive to improve the compression performance, not only on the latest codecs such as HEVC and VVC but also on MPEG-4 AVC and MPEG-2.
Operational Excellence
Operational excellence is important and it helps provide the 99.999% reliability or better, that consumers expect. With the ever increasing pace of change, areas such as ease of operation, maintenance, upgrade, and the flexibility to easily expand a system in scale or functionality are increasingly important.
Deployment options
This allows the same components within a system (or similar) to be deployed as software only, on bare metal, or in a private or public cloud instance. For those who want a traditional, appliance style system, these same components can be deployed on individual servers.
Aquila can be deployed as software only, running on standard COTS servers (which can optionally be supplied by MediaKind) or running on cloud instances whether they be private data centers or public cloud instances.
The ability to deploy in cloud environments can enable easy solution software upgrades, easy scaling, and a degree of independence from hardware lifecycles. Additionally deployment in the public cloud makes it possible to scale the solution for events, to test at scale without impacting the on-air system, and to provide a disaster recovery system in the cloud.
Configuration management and control is included via MediaKind Controller, or optionally by nCompass Control (purchased separately).
Aquila can provide a low risk upgrade path to operators with existing appliance based systems.
Aquila Advantages
Aquila targets streaming use-cases ensuring you get the best Total Cost of Ownership and Quality of Experience by leveraging technologies such as:
- Split and Shared encoding ensuring that 100% of the infrastructure resources are in use to provide added value to the viewer.
- Shared CMAF segments and Common Encryption of HLS and DASH reduce by up to 50% the need of storage in DVR and caching across a CDN.
- Constant Video Quality (CVQ) to reduce bandwidth and storage usage without impacting video quality.
- Low latency OTT using the CMAF LLC standard and the MediaKind Direct path to lower the end-to-end latency down to approximately 5 seconds.
| Software deployment | Appliance deployment | as a Service deployment | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compressed Input | Type:IP(IGMPv3-based redundancy and dual multicast redundancy),Dual source redundancy(active/active & active/passive modes),Pro-MPEG FEC support,Secure reliable Transport(SRT) Monitoring:ETR290, Packet loss statistics Protocols:MPEG-2TS(MPTS & SPTS),RTMP Codec:JPEG-XS,MPEG-2,H.264,HEVC-MPEG-1LII,Dolby Digital(AC-3),Dolby Digital Plus(E-AC3),AAC,HEAAC v1andv2,Dolby E(baseband input only) Data rate:SD/HD up to50Mbps,UHD up to80Mbps | ||
| Baseband input(optional hardware required) | 3G/HD/SD-SDI(max16per server) SDI over IP(SMPTE ST2022-6) SMPTE ST2110-20uncompressed video up toUHD resolution SMPTE ST2110-30/31:uncompressed audio SMPTE ST2110-40:data(VITC/Time code,AFD/BAR,Closed captioning,OP-47Teletext,SMPTE 2031 Teletext) All SMPTE ST2110essences can be input asST2022-7 NMOS IS-04andNMOS IS-05support |
Pre-Processing
| Software deployment | Appliance deployment | as a Service deployment | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aspect ratio | WSS, AFD, Video index | ||
| Metadata | SCTE-104, SCTE-35, IA608/708ClosedCaption, SCTE-20, DVBTeletext, DVB-VBI, SCTE-27, OP47, SMPTE2031, VITC, SMPTE2038, ARIBB24 | ||
| Image settings | Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Hue, Gamma, Temperature | ||
| Enhancement filters | Video: De-interlacing, Cropping, Letter boxing, Stretching, SD and HD Cross-scaling, 3:2 Pull down, MCTF, Deblocking filter, Spatial Denoising filter, CrossTalk filter, Sharpening, Diamond filter Audio: Automatic loudness control (A/85), Audio gain adjustment, Mute | ||
| Image overlays | Image insertion on input loss |
Video Encoding
| Software deployment | Appliance deployment | as a Service deployment | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Video codec | HEVC Main 10, HEVC Main Profile, H.264 Baseline/Main/High profile, MPEG-2, HDR: HDR10, HLG10, PQ10, Dolby Vision 8.1 & 5.0 | ||
| Rate control | CBR, VBR, Constant Video Quality | ||
| Data rate | From 100 kbps to 60 Mbps (1) | ||
| Resolutions | Progressive: from QCIF to UHD, up to 60 fps Interlaced: 480i, 576i, 720i and 1080i | ||
| Multi-stream | Shared and Split encoding for ABR outputs | ||
| Templates | Channel templates creation and management Default profiles templates for SD, HD & UHD services | ||
| Hardware Acceleration | QSV/SG1 encoding up to UHD, H.264, HEVC, MPEG-2 |
Audio Encoding
(1) Depends on codec and resolution
| Software deployment | Appliance deployment | as a Service deployment | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audio channels per service | Up to 8 stereo pairs. Radio Channels | ||
| Audio encoding | MPEG-4/MPEG-2 AAC, AAC 5.1, HE-AAC v1 & v2, HE-AAC 5.1, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, Windows Media Audio/Audio Pro, Transcode to Dolby Digital Plus (DD+) | ||
| Pass-through | MPEG1 LII, AC-3, Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC3) 5.1-ch or stereo, Dolby E | ||
| Data rate | From 4.75 kbps to 320 kbps (from 64 to 1024 kbps for DD+) |
Streaming Output Processing
| Software deployment | Appliance deployment | as a Service deployment | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Formatting | Apple HTTP Live Streaming (Over CMAF or TS), Microsoft Smooth Streaming, DASH Common CMAF segment delivery for HLS and DASH Low Latency Chunking support for DASH | ||
| Subtitling | Closed Captions: WebVTT for HLS, DFXP for HSS, WebVTT or SMPTE-TT for DASH DVB-Teletext page 888: WebVTT for HLS, DFXP for HSS, WebVTT or SMPTE-TT for DASH DVB-Subtitles: DFXP for HSS, SMPTE-TT for DASH | ||
| Multi audio | Multiple audio streams per output for HLS, Smooth Streaming and DASH | ||
| Content protection | Microsoft PlayReady DRM support for HLS/TS, Smooth Streaming and DASH Apple Segment for HLS/TS FairPlay support for HLS/TS and HLS/CMAF Adobe Primetime Access support HLS/TS Widevine, PlayReady and Marlin support in CTR mode for DASH Widevine and PlayReady support in CBC mode for DASH Key provisioning interface to leading CAS & DRM vendors |
Packaged Output
| Software deployment | Appliance deployment | as a Service deployment | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content publishing | Support for pull scenarios in just-in-time packaging Support publishing to local storage or to WebDAV servers | ||
| Origin server | Built-in live and VOD origin server for HLS, Smooth Streaming and DASH Up to 8000 simultaneous connections Custom HTTP headers management (Expiry settings, CORS headers...) Built-in support of HTTP 1.1 Chunked Transfer Encoding for Low Latency | ||
| CDN | Interfaces to leading CDNs Certified with Akamai MSL4 for HLS and DASH |
Metadata
| Software deployment | Appliance deployment | as a Service deployment | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subtitles pass-through and translation | EIA 608/708 Closed Caption, SCTE-20, DVB Teletext, DVB Subtitles, SCTE-27, ARIB B24 | ||
| Ad insertion | EBIF/EISS/AITSCTE-35 pass-through | ||
| Nielsen | Watermark extraction for multi-screen devices |
Monitoring & Control
| Software deployment | Appliance deployment | as a Service deployment | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Control interface | Up to 2 IP ports, monitoring and control ports (primary and spare) through API & GUI | API & GUI access is provided by MediaKind Prometheus, Grafana | |
| Control and system protocols | REST, HTTP, NTP, FTP, IGMPv2/v3, SNMPv2/3c | ||
| High availability | Support both 1+1 and N+M redundancy schemes Service synchronization on encoder and packager | High availability managed by MediaKind based on agreed uptime | |
| Content replacement | SCTE-35 in-band/ESAM out-of-band Triggers: Time signal, Splice-out/Splice-in, Alternate command, or manually triggered from GUI | ||
| Licensing | Centralized floating license | Appliance node locked license | Pay per use: hourly or monthly |
Infrastructure
| Software deployment | |
|---|---|
| Servers | MediaKind referenced HW IT Datacenter based on COTS servers (DELL, HP, Cisco) Private and public clouds |
| Option boards | NICs, and SDI (encoding Hardware acceleration) |
| Blueprint deployment | Centralized management and licensing (3x) with processing servers for channels transcoding and packaging |
| Appliance deployment | as a Service deployment |
|---|---|
| Aquila Appliances (G9 1057, G9 1027, & M2) | MediaKind selected cloud infrastructure |
| only) option boards | |
| Centralized management with control over the different processing appliances | Per channel deployment managed by MediaKind |