OpenCaster

Last updated
OpenCaster
Developer(s) Avalpa Digital Engineering s.r.l.
Initial release2008
Repository https://github.com/aventuri/opencaster
Written in C, Python
Operating system Debian
Available inMultilingual with English manual
Type multiplexing
License GNU General Public License v2 or later
Website www.avalpa.com/the-key-values/15-free-software/33-opencaster

OpenCaster is a collection of open-source and free software for the Debian GNU/Linux system to play out and multiplex MPEG transport streams. OpenCaster generates most of the non audio/video data present into transport streams and handles playout of pre-encoded audio/video files or can be integrated with third parties audio/video encoders.

Contents

Common use cases

Design principles

OpenCaster supports Interprocess communication among its different tools using Named pipes and enabling a high level of customization with shell scripts. The pipe paradigm has been criticized for performance, [1] but the performance loss may be accepted for the ability to customize.

Table generation is performed with serialization of a natural language description in Python and already features a large number of descriptors from different digital television standards. Adding new descriptors to the library is simple, and only requires knowledge of how the packet is specified bit by bit.

History

Originally tests were done in Cineca as part of a research project under a different name targeting broadcast of DSMCC file system for MHP interactive television but the project was already started from works by German National Research Center for Information Technology. The first service featuring OpenCaster DSMCC was broadcast on air in Italy in 2003. The first non-live DVB service 100% generated by OpenCaster and open source mpeg2 encoders is operating on air since 2004. OpenCaster was presented at the 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia [2] since then has been used also in other researches: DVB-T DIGITAL TV TANSMITTER BASED SOFTWARE, [3] MHP Conformance test, [4] Building of an HbbTV demonstrator [5] a project in collaboration with European Broadcasting Union, Open Source End-2-End DVB-H Mobile TV services and network infrastructure — The DVB-H pilot in Denmark. [6] OpenCaster was used in the HbbTV Test suite in 2014 [7] and has been cited as tool in From the Aether to the Ethernet – Attacking the Internet using Broadcast Digital Television [8]

Integration

OpenCaster has been successfully integrated with a long list of broadcasting products, among them there are products by Adtec, Cisco/Scientific Atlanta, Deltacast, Dektec, Ericsson/Tandberg Television, Eurotek, Harmonic/Scopus, MainConcept, Mitan, Screen Service, Sr-Systems, Wellav, ...

Testing

OpenCaster has been tested with Rohde & Schwarz DVM100L and DVM 400 and it is continuously tested with Dektec StreamXpert [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multicast</span> Computer networking technique

In computer networking, multicast is a type of group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast differs from physical layer point-to-multipoint communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DVB</span> Open standard for digital television broadcasting

Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a set of international open standards for digital television. DVB standards are maintained by the DVB Project, an international industry consortium, and are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

MPEG-1 Audio Layer II or MPEG-2 Audio Layer II is a lossy audio compression format defined by ISO/IEC 11172-3 alongside MPEG-1 Audio Layer I and MPEG-1 Audio Layer III (MP3). While MP3 is much more popular for PC and Internet applications, MP2 remains a dominant standard for audio broadcasting.

DigiCipher 2, or simply DCII, is a proprietary standard format of digital signal transmission and it doubles as an encryption standard with MPEG-2/MPEG-4 signal video compression used on many communications satellite television and audio signals. The DCII standard was originally developed in 1997 by General Instrument, which then became the Home and Network Mobility division of Motorola, then bought by Google in Aug 2011, and lastly became the Home portion of the division to Arris.

DVB-T, short for Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial, is the DVB European-based consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital terrestrial television that was first published in 1997 and first broadcast in Singapore in February, 1998. This system transmits compressed digital audio, digital video and other data in an MPEG transport stream, using coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing modulation. It is also the format widely used worldwide for Electronic News Gathering for transmission of video and audio from a mobile newsgathering vehicle to a central receive point. It is also used in the US by Amateur television operators.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ATSC standards</span> Standards for digital television in the US

Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standards are an International set of standards for broadcast and digital television transmission over terrestrial, cable and satellite networks. It is largely a replacement for the analog NTSC standard and, like that standard, is used mostly in the United States, Mexico, Canada, South Korea and Trinidad & Tobago. Several former NTSC users, such as Japan, have not used ATSC during their digital television transition, because they adopted other systems such as ISDB developed by Japan, and DVB developed in Europe, for example.

Multimedia Home Platform (DVB-MHP) is an open middleware system standard designed by the DVB project for interactive digital television. The MHP enables the reception and execution of interactive, Java-based applications on a TV-set. Interactive TV applications can be delivered over the broadcast channel, together with audio and video streams. These applications can be for example information services, games, interactive voting, e-mail, SMS or shopping. MHP applications can use an additional return channel that has to support IP.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DVB-S2</span> Digital satellite television standard

Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite - Second Generation (DVB-S2) is a digital television broadcast standard that has been designed as a successor for the popular DVB-S system. It was developed in 2003 by the Digital Video Broadcasting Project, an international industry consortium, and ratified by ETSI in March 2005. The standard is based on, and improves upon DVB-S and the electronic news-gathering system, used by mobile units for sending sounds and images from remote locations worldwide back to their home television stations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet Protocol television</span> Television transmitted over a computer network

Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. This is in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable television formats. Unlike downloaded media, IPTV offers the ability to stream the source media continuously. As a result, a client media player can begin playing the content almost immediately. This is known as streaming media.

Datacasting is the broadcasting of data over a wide area via radio waves. It most often refers to supplemental information sent by television stations along with digital terrestrial television (DTT), but may also be applied to digital signals on analog TV or radio. It generally does not apply to data inherent to the medium, such as PSIP data that defines virtual channels for DTT or direct broadcast satellite system, or to things like cable modems or satellite modems, which use a completely separate channel for data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Common Interface</span> Technology to decrypt pay television channels

In Digital Video Broadcasting, the Common Interface is a technology which allows decryption of pay TV channels. Pay TV stations want to choose which encryption method to use. The Common Interface allows TV manufacturers to support many different pay TV stations, by allowing to plug in exchangeable conditional-access modules (CAM) for various encryption schemes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asynchronous serial interface</span> Standardised transport interface for the broadcast industry

Asynchronous Serial Interface, or ASI, is a method of carrying an MPEG Transport Stream (MPEG-TS) over 75-ohm copper coaxial cable or optical fiber. It is popular in the television industry as a means of transporting broadcast programs from the studio to the final transmission equipment before it reaches viewers sitting at home.

Digital Satellite System is the initialism expansion of the DSS digital satellite television transmission system used by DirecTV. Only when digital transmission was introduced did direct broadcast satellite (DBS) television become popular in North America, which has led to both DBS and DSS being used interchangeably to refer to all three commonplace digital transmission formats; DSS, DVB-S and 4DTV. Analog DBS services, however, existed prior to DirecTV and were still operational in continental Europe until April 2012.

IP over DVB implies that Internet Protocol datagrams are distributed using some digital television system, for example DVB-H, DVB-SH, DVB-T, DVB-S, DVB-C or their successors like DVB-T2, DVB-S2, and DVB-C2. This may take the form of IP over MPEG, where the datagrams are transferred over the MPEG transport stream, or the datagrams may be carried in the DVB baseband frames directly, as in GSE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GPAC Project on Advanced Content</span>

GPAC Project on Advanced Content is an implementation of the MPEG-4 Systems standard written in ANSI C. GPAC provides tools for media playback, vector graphics and 3D rendering, MPEG-4 authoring and distribution.

A Web-to-TV installation provides a way to show streaming television or other over-the-top content from the Internet, to a television set. Various technologies to do this include Home theater PCs, digital media receivers, and Smart TVs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV</span> Industry standard for hybrid digital television

Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) is both an industry standard and promotional initiative for hybrid digital TV to harmonise the broadcast, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), and broadband delivery of entertainment to the end consumer through connected TVs and set-top boxes. The HbbTV Association, comprising digital broadcasting and Internet industry companies, has established a standard for the delivery of broadcast TV and broadband TV to the home, through a single user interface, creating an open platform as an alternative to proprietary technologies. Products and services using the HbbTV standard can operate over different broadcasting technologies, such as satellite, cable, or terrestrial networks.

The Helix Universal Media Server was a product developed by RealNetworks and originates from the first streaming media server originally developed by Progressive Networks in 1994. It supported a variety of streaming media delivery transports including MPEG-DASH RTMP (flash), RTSP (standard), HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Microsoft Silverlight and HTTP Progressive Download enabling mobile phone OS and PC OS media client delivery.

BBC Redux was a BBC Research & Development system that digitally recorded television and radio output in the United Kingdom produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation. It operated from 2007 to 2022 and contains several petabytes of recordings and subtitle data. It is notable for being the proof of concept for the Flash video streaming version of the BBC iPlayer.

Astra is a professional software to organize digital broadcasting service for TV operators and broadcasters, internet service providers, hotels, etc. Astra is an acronym for "advanced streaming application".

References

  1. "Performance Analysis of Various Mechanisms for Inter-process Communication" (PDF). Operating Systems and Networks Lab, Dept. of Computer Science, Binghamton University. 2007.
  2. "An open source software framework for DVB-* transmission" Acm paper presented jointly with ftw. Telecommunications Research Center Vienna, Vienna, Austria at 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. ACM. 2008. pp. 1093–1096. doi:10.1145/1459359.1459579. ISBN   9781605583037. S2CID   99579.
  3. "PEMANCAR TV DIGITAL DVB-T BERBASIS SOFTWARE". ITS Library. 2010.
  4. "UITBOUWEN VAN EEN TESTOPSTELLING VOOR TESTEN VAN MHP-FUNCTIES VOOR DIGITALE TELEVISIEONTVANGERS" (PDF). Katholieke Hogeschool Limburg. 2009.
  5. "Building of an HbbTV demonstrator" (PDF). hepia – Haute école du paysage, d’ingénierie et d’architecture. 2010.
  6. Hammershoj, Allan; Pedersen, Gil; Tadayoni, Reza (2009). Open Source End-2-End DVB-H Mobile TV services and network infrastructure — The DVB-H pilot in Denmark. IEEE. pp. 644–648. doi:10.1109/WIRELESSVITAE.2009.5172522. ISBN   978-1-4244-4066-5. S2CID   16434816.
  7. "Test Specification for HbbTV Version 1.2.1" (PDF). HbbTV Association. 2014.
  8. "From the Aether to the Ethernet – Attacking the Internet using Broadcast Digital Television" (PDF). Columbia University. 2014.
  9. "Debian -- Details of package opencaster in buster". packages.debian.org. Retrieved 2024-03-28.