Media Pool - Flexible Video Server Design for Television Broadcasting

It appears to be an accepted fact that disk based video storage systems are viable solutions for broadcasters to store and play video in their facilities. One of the more accepted disk based video products in the broadcast facility is the video server. There are various approaches and technologies that manufacturers can use to build servers. All of these design decisions and trade-offs contribute to various video server architectures to address the task of delivering program content and commercials. The Media Pool video server offers a unique architecture and flexibility that leverages disk bandwidth and system modularity to provide a system capable of multiple full bandwidth CCIR 601 streams, system scalability, and standard industry interfaces, protocols to integrate the system into your facility. — A video server is made up of various sub-systems to allow the storage and retrieval of video and audio to and from hard disk in real time. The architecture of each of those sub-systems and the interrelationship between them have a major impact on the performance of the system in terms of system responsiveness, bandwidth capabilities, and system scalability. In addition, disk array configurations, system timing, internal data transport, data buffering schemes, and disk access algorithms will affect system operation. Providing separate sub-systems that focus on specific tasks allows for increased system performance and more flexible operation. — The Media Pool video server from Philips Broadcast Television Systems Company includes a Storage Sub-System, Input/Output Sub-System, a Video Transfer Sub-System, and a Control Sub-System. The Storage Sub-System is responsible for reading and writing data to and from hard disk drives in real time, perform disk synchronization, and data buffering. The I/O Sub-System (I/O) provides all of the connections to a broadcast facility, similar to the connections found on a Video Tape Recorder. The Video Transfer Sub-System takes care of bandwidth management from one or more storage arrays to one or more I/Os. The Control Sub-System allows for system monitoring, database administration, simultaneous multi-user access, and the support for integrated applications. — Other variables affect the performance of the system. These include system compression techniques, data striping, system bandwidth, and reliability features. — All of these topics and more will be covered in this paper in detail to describe a very effective approach to streaming real-time video from disk based storage to multiple channels in a broadcast facility.

Published

1996-10

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00101

ISBN

978-1-61482-925-6