Going Live with ToolsOnAir's GStreamer broadcast mixing architecture

Within the last year, we have used GStreamer to develop the architecture of a new live broadcast mixing engine. A single large live pipeline is constantly running. Inputs, outputs and new channel busses can be created and added to the running pipeline at any time. The mixer output and its inputs can be manipulated and monitored remotely by an accompanying OSX mixing application. This application also uses GStreamer to play back streams coming from the engine. Application and engine are both synchronised to a common global PTP clock, using GStreamer's own synchronisation methods.

In this talk we are going to present the overall architecture of this system. We show how bleeding-edge features of GStreamer 1.6 enable a very powerful and extensible mixing pipeline for IP-based broadcast video. Among those are PTP clocking support, RTP/RTSP enhancements, improved use of GPUs, improved OSX support, better decklink elements etc. We'll also show the successful integration of BBC's IP studio system with our GStreamer-based pipeline. This is the result of a recent field-trial of the ICoSOLE EU project that ToolsOnAir and the BBC are part of.

Heinrich Fink is a software engineer at ToolsOnAir. He has a MSc in Visual Computing and is currently working in the R&D team at ToolsOnAir. He has been working as a teaching assistant for several years together with Professor Michael Wimmer at TU Vienna. His work “Teaching a modern graphics pipeline using a shader-based software renderer” was published by the Computers & Graphics Journal. During his master thesis “GPU-based Video Processing in the Context of TV Broadcasting” he implemented the open-source OpenGL benchmarking tool “gl-frame-bender”. At ToolsOnAir, he is leading the development of a new GStreamer-based media engine which is used by future and current products.