Ungluing Audio and Video - How Audio over IP Enables the Future

After decades of work to successfully carry audio and video over the same serial digital interface (SDI), arguably the time has come to split them apart again. Audio embedding and de-embedding was never perfect and remains limited. Carriage of metadata, which will become more essential with new services, is currently inaccurate and complex. Unbelievably, lip sync issues are worse than ever before. Further, channel based audio is heading for replacement by carriage of the objects that make up the channels. This enables flexibility and enhanced consumer experiences for broadcast and OTT services. SDI is, at heart, a video format and it cannot support the future of audio. Alarmingly, the future is ringing the front bell today. AES67, Livewire+ and related standards offer a path to making all of this work – including lip sync! AES and SMPTE are working together, and the results will enable the sub-sample accurate linking of Audio over IP (which has existed in radio for over a decade and is growing in TV) and video, all without requiring it to be glued together until the very end.

Published

2015-07

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M001619

ISBN

978-1-61482-955-3