Agile Live 4.0.0
Agile Live 4.0.0 is the fourth major release of the Agile Live system. This release contains a brand new audio mixer, lots of new metrics, picture-in-picture effects and improvements all over the board.
See the Release documentation for more details.
Audio mixer and improved audio transport
This release includes a new build-in audio mixer as a part of the acl-renderingengine. This mixer currently supports parametric EQ, compressor and panning per source. The transport of audio has also been improved by allowing up to 16 audio channels per stream from an Ingest to a Pipeline to be transported. When setting up the stream the new audio_mapping parameter can be used to select which channels to transport, the order of them and group them as mono or stereo to save bandwidth in the transport. The new Audio Router that is controlled using the control panel API is then used to map the incoming channels to the input channel strips of the audio mixer. On top of this the new release also adds support for the low-latency Opus audio codec in the contribution between the Ingest and the Pipeline. It is now possible to chose, per stream, to use Opus or AAC-LC as the codec.
Metrics
This release adds a bunch of new metrics and counters to REST API, which makes it easier to monitor the system state and track down the cause of any problems. The new metrics includes counters for packets on the contribution links between Ingests and Pipelines, where it is now possible to track the number of retransmitted packets and the round-trip time to monitor the quality of the link; duration timers to track how much time is spent on encoding, transport and decoding between the Ingest and the Pipeline, to make it easier to tweak the alignment of the streams and to make sure you have enough headroom to handle fluctuations; metrics on the outgoing links to make sure not only the streams are healthy inside the system, but also on their way out from the system; and more.
New video mixing features
The Rendering engine has granted some new video mixing related features. One of them is to produce picture-in-pictures, a useful effect for instance when showing a remote reporter talking to people in the main studio. This release includes two separate picture-in-picture effects which can be displayed one at a time, or both together, at the same time as background and overlay graphics is shown. The picture-in-pictures can be cut individually and placed anywhere in the main frame. Another new feature of the video mixer is the new transition types, the classic wipe. Both left and right!
SRT output improvements
The SRT outputs have been updated with some new features, which is both applicable for Outputs and Multi-view outputs. Earlier it was only possible to use SRT outputs in listener mode, i.e. where the Pipeline opens a port, listening for SRT clients that want to pull the stream from the port. From this release it is also possible to use the SRT in “caller” mode, where the Pipeline connects to a remote, listening SRT application, to which the stream is pushed. Also, to protect the content of the stream, it is now also possible to encrypt the outgoing SRT streams by providing a passphrase.