InBroadcast – global broadcast industry monthly magazine | Article
Written by Cristian Recoseanu, Development Lead at Pebble
One of the consistent rules of our industry is that every broadcast engineer and content producer needs to connect equipment. Whether working in SDI or IP, signals need to be routed and switched around your setting, be that a production facility, a playout centre, a regional broadcast station, or an OB truck.
In the world of SDI there are lots of options to help you do this. But in IP environments connection and device management becomes a whole lot more complex. For every device joining your network, you need to set an IP address so it’s visible to the network, and then for each output on each device you need to allocate a multicast address and a multicast port for video, for audio, and for ancillary data.
In an IP environment, it’s also more difficult to lock and synchronise all these sources together. You can’t simply run a genlock cable and plug it in as you would in the SDI world — you will need to set all the PTP (precision time protocol) parameters for each device. You can, of course, do all of this manually for every client that joins the network, but this is cumbersome, time-consuming, and provides an increased likelihood of making errors. And given some broadcast environments where you only have a couple of buttons and a very small display on which to work, it can be extremely fiddly, challenging, and time-consuming…
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