Understanding the Latest AV Standards
How to choose the right one for your next project
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Standards in a myriad of industries help to ensure products and technologies work the way they are supposed to. In the audiovisual industry, they also ensure interoperability between products. Not only do products need to perform as expected, but they must work seamlessly with each other for a successful installation. Not every brand plays well with other brands, however. That’s where AV standards become important.
“These new and emerging standards and protocols are all about getting audio and video transport on the network and making it infinitely scalable,” says Brandon Creel, partner at Hewshott, an independent consultant in the AV, acoustics and theater industries. He adds, “Largely, all of these different technologies are different options for deploying AV and infrastructure and getting that signal wherever it needs to be. The difference is how they go about it, where they came from and how they’re implemented.”
Paul Harris, owner of Aurora Multimedia, based in Morganville, New Jersey, takes a slightly different view of defining the emerging AV-over-IP (AVoIP) standards today. He explains that NDI, SMPTE ST2110, SDVoE and IPMX are all “protocols,” rather than true industry “standards.”
“What is the standard but a popularity contest?” he ponders. “Look at Apple. Apple is not a standard, but they own a majority of the smartphone market, so they created an ecosystem that people would consider a standard. Then you’ve got Android phones. Is Android a standard? Not really.”
Right now, manufacturers and integrators in the audiovisual industry face a similar situation with various AV-over IP standards or, more accurately, protocols, competing for a share in the marketplace. Specifiers have many options to transmit signals with AVoIP, but there’s no single standard to ensure that all brands of equipment will work with each other.
Similar to the Android operating system for smartphones, the various AVoIP protocols enable third-party manufacturers to use and deploy them. This allows multiple manufacturers and brands to adopt various distribution standards, often accommodating multiple protocols in one product, which gives integrators and end-users more choices.
A challenge arises when components don’t work the way they should, even though they claim to follow the same industry standards, Harris points out.
Ultimately, standards are important to ensure that brands from different manufacturers can work together. “When they don’t work together,” Harris asks, “whose fault is it?”
The answer, he says, is easy and it’s part of human nature. “The person who answered the phone in tech support and tried to help people out. Somehow [that company] becomes liable.”
Often, it’s the smaller manufacturer, with robust tech support, who gets caught in the crossfires of the customer’s ire.
“To create interoperability, you need two things to happen,” Harris continues. “You need a transport that everybody follows, which is how it’s packetized. And then you need a compression algorithm that can deliver good quality and is scalable; it can do low bandwidth all the way to high bandwidth, which means your compression goes down relative to the resolution.”
Fortunately, as different projects have varying needs, and different standards have different benefits, it gives integrators more options to find the right product for any project.
Since the industry largely moved to IP for audio and video transport, multiple protocols emerged to transmit signals. But Creel points out that customers often aren’t aware these technologies exist, and they rarely ask for them by name.
“Our clients won’t typically say, ‘We’re looking for an NDI solution.’ They’ll come to us and say, ‘Here’s our problem; here’s our scenario; here’s our situation and we’re looking for a solution,’” Creel explains. “As a specifier, it’s up to us to understand all of the technologies and all of the standards and then select what we think is going to be the best solution for the client.”
Of course, if a client already has a system deployed in a retrofit or expansion project, the consultant or integrator might be locked into that protocol. But, barring that situation, Creel says, “It’s up to us to understand all the options out there and compare and contrast them and figure out what is the best fit.”
It can be challenging for even the most experienced AV integrators to keep tabs on all the emerging standards. Thus, we offer here a thumbnail sketch of each.
“These new standards are evolving,” says Creel, who points out that it’s not an “apples-to-apples” comparison. “You have to really compare and contrast,” he says, advising integrators to evaluate the different capabilities, costs and limitations for each.
“Ultimately, it’s good for customers because it gives them choice and helps to drive some innovation,” says Brad Hintze, executive vice president, marketing, at Rockleigh, New Jersey-based Crestron Electronics. “But it certainly adds to the confusion of multiple standards.”
Developed by a company called NewTek, NDI is a protocol initially designed for broadcast, providing low latency and moderate compression. NDI carries video, multichannel audio and metadata like tally information. While people often say “NDI,” we must be aware of what release of NDI they are referring to. The current version, which was just released, is NDI 6. There are several variants, including NDI HX, HX2 and HX3, so you really have to be specific. There are also two versions of an NDI computer application that works through an internet-connected computer: Connect and Connect Pro. They allow users to see any NDI sources on the network, as well as use the computer as a source, including the webcam, if equipped. NDI has been gaining traction in the AV industry for a variety of applications, experts agree.
SMPTE ST 2110 offers the advantages of low latency and low compression, Harris says. Designed to replace the Serial Digital Interface (SDI) protocol, SMPTE 2110 offers the advantage of synchronization across audio and video streams, regardless of how the packets are routed, according to SMPTE.org.
Internet Protocol Media Experience (IPMX) is a set of open standards and specifications created by the non-profit Alliance for IP Media Solutions. It deploys the SMPTE ST 2110 standard, along with JPEG XS standard, to transport compressed and uncompressed audio and video across networks. It uses the FPGA topology, however, making it costlier and adding extensive cooling requirements to an application.
Software Defined Video over Ethernet (SDVoE) was designed as a complete ecosystem for IT and AV infrastructure. It delivers high-quality AV with no frame latency and offers transport control channels for RS-232, USB and IR. Unlike many other standards, it has relatively low power requirements.
Harris likens today’s vast array of AVoIP standards to the competition between VHS and Beta decades ago. The VHS protocol was licensed to multiple manufacturers, while Beta remained proprietary to Sony. Due to the variety of content available on the platform, VHS ultimately won out. For a more recent example, Harris says, the HDMI standard won out over DisplayPort as a means to transport video signals. “DisplayPort, when it first came out, was the better technology,” he says.
But, once HDMI merged their protocol into the silicon chips that power the display devices, they dominated the market. “You’ll find HDMI everywhere, because they sell their core. They sell their intellectual property so regardless of what chip manufacturer it is, HDMI is built into it,” he says. However, the AV industry isn’t likely to see the same consolidation in AVoIP protocols, according to experts.
“I think we’ll always have three to five options from a standards perspective, and then you’ll have a list of ‘proprietary’ standards from single manufacturers, as well,” says Hintze.
Harris agrees. “They all have their pros. They all have their cons,” he says. A protocol must appeal in every situation, not just in specialized applications, to become a true standard.
There’s another factor hindering the widespread adoption of certain protocols: the chip topologies used to create them. FPGA and ASIC are custom logic solutions that allow system architects to create hardware solutions. Both topologies have benefits and drawbacks.
FPGA is a field programmable gate array, or “a building block to turn it into just about anything you want,” Harris says. Often, manufacturers will develop their protocol on an FPGA and then stamp it into an ASIC: an Application Specific Integrated Circuit.
When it comes to AVoIP standards, SDVoE operates on a low-power ASIC, while SMPTE ST 2110, NDI and IPMX all use FPGA, making them more expensive, more power-hungry and less eco-friendly. However, to create chips using ASIC topology, you need bulk quantities. “There’s a risk/reward in it,” Harris says.
However, these standards all provide solid solutions for many applications. “It’s about popularity and acceptance,” Harris says. “It’s about addressing the needs of the many across industries.”
In the absence of unity or alignment around an AVoIP standard, integrators, consultants and specifiers are left to choose the best platform for any given application. Ideally, the technology you choose will balance latency, quality and scalability as appropriate for the application. It will offer security. It will fit the customer’s budget. And it will be compatible with all the components specified in the project, allowing all the hardware to work together.
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That’s a tall order, which is why it’s important for integrators and consultants to stay up to date on the technology and rely on trusted industry partners like ADI, which have the resources to offer a birds-eye view of the various technologies and help make sense of these emerging standards.
“Obviously, you don’t jump into the new tech and offer it across the board,” says Creel. “You proceed slowly. You might get some equipment, mock it up in your shop and then understand what the pain points are before you’re selling it. That way you can educate not only yourself but [also] the account managers and the sales engineers so the client can understand. Just because [something is] new doesn’t mean it’s the right choice.”
