Xilinx accelerates broadcast industry adoption of video over IP

IBC 2011, AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS: Xilinx Inc. announced the availability of its SMPTE 2022-5/-6 intellectual property core, the company's newest building block for broadcast equipment developers delivering the internet protocol (IP)-based systems needed to cut the high cost of transporting raw, high-bit video from remote events, to studios, to post editing houses, and other points along the production process.

The core brings Forward Error Correction (FEC) for video over IP to Xilinx's Broadcast Real-Time Video Engine Targeted Design Platform so developers can quickly build flexible, high-bandwidth systems capable of recovering IP packets lost to network transmission errors and ensure the picture-perfect quality of uncompressed, full bandwidth professional video.

"The ability of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to bridge broadcast and communications domains -- and perform real-time video processing in a highly integrated fashion -- ultimately leads to dramatically reduced capital expenditures and operating expenses for the broadcast industry," said Robert Green, senior manager, Broadcast Business at Xilinx. "Now that video can be reliably delivered over 10 Gbps Ethernet (10 GbE), the convergence of broadcast and telecommunications will, for example, lead to far fewer broadcast trucks and eliminate miles of cable at events such as NASCAR and World Cup Football."

The SMPTE 2022-5/-6 video networking standard defines a transport protocol for the carriage of real-time, non-piecewise constant, variable bit rate (VBR) MPEG-2 Transport Streams over IP networks. The capability to robustly support multiple, uncompressed High-Definition (HD) and 3D high-resolution video streams encapsulated in SMPTE 2022-5/-6 Ethernet IP packet format is critical to the deployment of a new generation of broadcast equipment that will eventually replace many of the portable infrastructures that support outside live broadcast and remote production.

With this announcement, Xilinx brings FEC functionality to its SMPTE 2022-6 intellectual property core first announced at NAB 2011, to enable the recovery of video data lost to network transmission errors.

"SMPTE 2022 and the Xilinx 10 Gbps video over IP technology will make equipment available to me so I can focus on doing my job and not worry about delays between production steps to physically transport video tapes or HDD from place to place," said Matthew Miller, freelance video editor and head of Mad Capper Studios whose production credits include "Project Runway," "Ancient Aliens," "America's Next Top Model," and many others. "In a nut shell, the technology removes extra steps in the editing process so I can edit on the fly, leaving me more time to focus on high-production value content."

Having the ability to remove delays in getting content to the production team through dailies or for offline editing and color grading, as well as using high-performance, compute-intensive platforms based on Xilinx FPGAs for real-time video processing, compression and modulation, means that high quality content can be captured, processed and delivered faster than ever before.