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News

ACP News

ESB3021 Release 1.12.0

By Nhan Nguyen |

Today, 2024-10-23, we have released a feature packed ew-vodingest, version 1.12.0. Among other things we now support generating DASH thumbnails for recordings and VoD. There is also bug fix about audioindex in SMIL and make temporary storage is able to be specified by argument --local-storage.

For further details see the release notes

ESB3021 Release 1.10.0

By Adam Horvath |

Today we have released a feature packed ew-vodingest, version 1.10.0. Among other things we now support VOD ingest over FTP, and several new subtitling formats. The release also contains bugfixes and improved command-line help.

For further details see the release notes

ESB3022 Release 1.0.0

By Adam Horvath |

We are happy to announce the first release of ESB3022. It includes fundamental ESF/JITP support.

See the release notes for further details.

ESB3021 Release 1.2.0

By Adam Horvath |

We are happy to announce that the ESB3021, with today’s release, now supports live recordings. This release also includes increased ESB3005 compatibility, and several robustness improvements.

See the release notes for further details.

Edgeware CCMI URLs

By Torbjörn Einarsson |

Edgeware uses a particular origin URL structure called CCMI URLs for its origin services. It is the format that the repackager (ESB3002) and the ew-manip (ESB3020) services understand natively. It is now explained in a new short document.

Go to CCMI URLs to learn more.

ESB3019 Release 0.10.0

By Torbjörn Einarsson |

The ESB3019 release contains many new features and is a great step towards version 1.0 later this spring.

See the release notes for more details.

vod2live IBC demo

A nice vod2live demo developed for IBC 2021
By Torbjörn Einarsson |

The physical IBC show 2021 was cancelled, but we developed a great demo to show the concept and possibilities. To make it responsive, it doesn’t deal with full assets, and automatic channel creation, but one can interactively add content to the live timeline. The content is created in 1 minute slots, where each slot has a 40s main asset, and 20s of ads which can be placed as one 20s add or two 10s ads inside or after the main asset.

Contact us to get a personal demonstration of the demo.

ibc2021-demo

ACD News

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ESB3024 Release 1.14.2

By David Thyberg |

A new maintenance release of ESB3024 Router with bug fixes.
See the release notes for more details.

ESB3024 Release 1.14.0

By David Thyberg |

A new official release of ESB3024 Router with improvements and bug fixes.
See the release notes for more details.

ESB3024 Release 1.12.1

By David Thyberg |

A new maintenance release of ESB3024 Router with a bug fix.
See the release notes for more details.

ESB3024 Release 1.12.0

By David Thyberg |

A new official release of ESB3024 Router with improvements and bug fixes.
See the release notes for more details.

ESB3024 Release 1.10.2

By David Thyberg |

A new maintenance release of ESB3024 Router with bug fixes for consistent hashing and configuration size.
See the release notes for more details.

ESB3024 Release 1.10.1

By David Thyberg |

A new maintenance release of ESB3024 Router with a couple of updates.
See the release notes for more details.

ESB3024 Release 1.10.0

By David Thyberg |

A new production release of ESB3024 Router.
Agile CDN Director now comes equipped with native support for streamer health checking and request routing based on streamer hardware metrics.
See the release notes for more details.

ESB3024 Release 1.8.0

By David Thyberg |

A new production release of ESB3024 Router.
New features as well as bug fixes.
See the release notes for more details.

ESB3032 Release 1.2.1

By David Thyberg |

A new production release of the ACD Aggregator, ESB3032.

See the release notes for more details.

ESB3032 Release 1.0.0

By David Thyberg |

The ESB3032 release is the first official release of the ACD Aggregator.

See the release notes for more details.

ESB3024 Release 1.0.0

By David Thyberg |

The ESB3024 release is the first official release of the ACD Router.

See the release notes for more details.

Agile Live News

Agile Live has a New Home

Agile Live has permanently moved.

Agile Live has been acquired by Ateliere Creative Technologies. Read press-release here.

The new docs home is here.

Agile Live 7.0.0

Second release of Agile Live in 2024.

Agile Live 7.0.0 is the seventh major release of Agile Live. This release greatly improves the ability to customize the video and audio mixer in the Rendering Engine along with a bunch of new and improved features in the internal audio mixer.

See the Release documentation for more details.

Configurable video and audio mixers

The Rendering Engine has granted a major new feature in this release, as it is now possible to set up the mixers using a config file passed to the application at startup. This will allow the user to freely design the video mixer node graph, set up multiple audio outputs with post fader auxes and to create multiple output streams that pick and choose from output points in the video node graph and among the output buses of the audio mixer. This will not only make it possible to re-create all the effects possible to make with M/E stages in traditional hardware video mixers, but also to make even more advanced mixer effects. Also, multiple outputs means it is now possible to achieve effects such as “clean video outputs” without graphics overlays but with the same audio as in the main program output, create previews of stages of the video mixer to show in the multi-viewer, to allow chroma keys, picture-in-picture effects and so on to be set up and previewed in a multiview before being shown in the live feed. For more details, refer to the new Rendering Engine configuration documentation page.

Multiple audio mixer outputs and mix-minus support

With the configuration support mentioned above the system has also received a long awaited feature: support for mix-minus. When setting up outputs from the internal audio mixer, output buses can be configured to “follow” other output buses, i.e. act as a post fader aux send for another bus. This means that you can have your program bus on one audio mixer output, and a mix-minus output, where you remove the sound of your host, on another output. The rest of the audio in that output will follow whatever you do in your program output (except for the audio of your host’s microphone of course).

Two other improvements to the audio mixer includes commands to mute a channel in a specific output. This is useful as the volume level is kept intact until you un-mute the input. The muting is controlled per input in each output bus and the mixer also features a mute control for each output bus, so that all audio can be muted at once in that output. For those who are into automatization of workflows, the new auto fader will come in handy. With this new command you can tell the audio mixer to move any volume fader to a specific level over a specified time period. Perfect for automatically fading the audio from a studio situation to a pre recorded video or vice versa.

Enhanced EQ

In this release the EQ has been revamped, now allowing up to ten EQ filters to be configured. All filters are initially turned off, but can be individually turned on and configured to the required type, allowing much more flexibility than the old three-filter EQ where each filter only could be set to one of three types. The new EQ supports seven different types of filters. Among others, the new notch filter, which has a very narrow band which makes it useful for cutting specific frequencies containing humming noises or the sound of the wind.

Improved REST API

The REST API has been restructured resulting in a new version for the endpoints, /api/v3. The biggest change is that the concept of Control Receivers has been almost completely hidden in the API and the relation of Control Receivers and Pipelines has changed, so that each Pipeline now always has exactly one Control Receiver. Since this makes it a one-to-one mapping, the UUIDs of Control Receivers has been removed and instead the UUID of the Pipeline is used when setting up Control Connections with the REST API, which makes it much easier to use the API. This also means all endpoints containing /pipelines/{uuid}/controlreceivers have been removed, making the REST API more easy to overview and understand. In addition to this, the response payloads of some endpoints have been reformatted to make them easier to understand and to traverse. For more details, see the upgrade instructions.

Agile Live 6.0.0

First release of Agile Live in 2024.

Agile Live 6.0.0 is the sixth major release of Agile Live. Two major new features in this release are the built-in media playback and support for SRT sources in the Ingest.

See the Release documentation for more details.

Built-in media playback

The Rendering Engine now supports built-in playback of media files using FFmpeg under the hood. This allows for playing vignettes, pre-recorded material video loops and much more, recorded in a wide variety of formats. The media files are played back directly in the Rendering Engine, meaning there is no extra bandwidth required from the Ingests to the Rendering Engine as the material is already located on the Rendering Engine server. The player supports the obvious features such as play, pause and seeking the media files, but can also be set to play just a section of the entire clip, or to automatically loop a section or the entire clip. Multiple media players can be created and operated independent from each other, making it possible to cut directly from one pre-recorded clip to another. To aid the production crew in the control room it is also possible to access data with the current state of the media players from the build-in HTML renderer. By creating HTML pages that utilizes this data, it is possible to display the remaining time and other information about clips in a view in the multi-viewer, or even render time codes over the outgoing stream, for instance to display on a feedback monitor in the studio for the host to know how much time is left of the clip and how long until they cut back to the studio.

SRT ingest

The Ingest application has received a new input interface, for SRT sources. This type of source is a bit different from the already supported types, as SRT sources are not discovered and created automatically. To set up a new SRT input, the user must send a request to the REST API to create a new SRT receiver on a certain Ingest. Here it is possible to select the usual SRT settings, such as “caller” or “listener” mode, re-transmission latency, passphrase and of course the hostname and port to either listen for an SRT connection on, or to call and pull the SRT stream from. Once set up, the SRT source will stay there and will automatically reconnect in case the sending application would disappear due to a network or application failure. The current implementation has support for MPEG-TS with H.264/AVC or HEVC encoded video and AAC encoded audio.

Debian packages

From this release the binaries are distributed as .deb packages, which will simplify installation. This will make most of the smaller 3rd party dependencies install automatically and the applications will be installed to a default location where they are easily found by all users on a machine. The .deb-packages also make it possible for the user to install only the parts of the system which is of interest for that particular machine. As an example, on a machine that will only run an Ingest application, the user can install only the ingest .deb-package and ignore the packages and dependencies needed for a machine running the Rendering Engine or Control Panels.

Agile Live 5.0.0

Third release of Agile Live in 2023.

Agile Live 5.0.0 is the fifth major release of the Agile Live system. This release adds HTML template support, chroma keying and WebSocket support for Control Panel GUIs among other things.

See the Release documentation for more details.

Built-in HTML rendering

This release features a new HTML rendering module based on the well known Chromium engine (the same web browser engine as used in Google Chrome). This allows rendering HTML graphics templates right in the Rendering Engine where the rendered page is fed into the Rendering Engine though an input slot, just like any video from an Ingest. Name signs, tickers, logos, transition graphics, you name it! It even supports having multiple HTML templates loaded, feeding their rendered pages to different input slots, in case of productions with many different graphical elements. The HTML templates can be controlled from the Control Panels by sending JavaScript commands, making it very flexible and powerful. Since the HTML templates are regular webpages JavaScript can be used to make them automatically update themselves or download the data to display. To ensure the templates are rendered exactly the same way in case multiple Pipelines are used with different video resolution, the operator can choose the canvas size when new HTML pages are loaded and the HTML page will be automatically resized to fit the video resolution of the Pipeline in case needed. So even if your graphics team has made an HTML template which will only work when rendered in 1080p, it will look correct in a 720p production.

Chroma Key node

The Rendering Engine has received a new node to create Chroma Keying effects. With this new node it is possible to key green and blue screens, or why not a pink screen? The chroma keyer comes with easy-to-use controls. Just set the key color and the distance and falloff from this color is also considered a part of the key color. In case you still see some key color around the edges, the spill reduction control will come to your help, desaturating the edges to make your chroma key look good. To aid the key color picking, there are also controls to pick a color directly from the incoming video feed.

Audio peak meters

This release has made the work of the audio operator much easier. The multi view output now features peak audio meters, showing the audio levels in real time for all the connected sources, as well as the audio on the program output. With yellow and red areas defining the -20 and -8 dbFS levels respectively, it is both possible to monitor that the audio levels are within a suitable range, apart from the obvious use case: to see if there are actually any audio being transported to the production at all…

WebSocket Control Panel

A new Control Panel has been added with this release. Working similar to the TCP Control Panel, the new WebSocket Control Panel will relay commands sent from a WebSocket client to the Production. The WebSocket interface makes integration against web based GUIs much easier, lowering the entry barrier of Control Panel GUI creators significantly.

Agile Live 4.0.0

Second release of Agile Live in 2023.

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.

Agile Live 3.0.0

First release of Agile Live in 2023.

Agile Live 3.0.0 is the third major release of the Agile Live system. This release contains a major reorganization and improvement of the REST API as well as support for ingesting interlaced sources and JPEG encoding on Nvidia GPUs.

See the Release documentation for more details.

Reorganized REST API

The REST API has seen some major reorganizations in this release to make it more user friendly and simplify some operations. One such improvement is the management of Control Connections between Control Panels and the Control Receivers. These connections are now categorized under a new endpoint called /controlconnections. Creating, updating and closing these connections are now much easier, as each connection get its own unique UUID at creation and the same endpoints are used, no matter if the connection is originating from a Control Panel or a Control Receiver. Similar changes have been made to the Stream endpoints.

Support for interlaced sources

“Interlacing is dead” has been declared for years now, but despite this, many broadcasters are still locked into interlaced workflows due to legacy systems. To simplify the movement towards a progressive future we have added support for ingesting interlaced sources in Agile Live in this release. De-interlacing is implemented for both the Intel and Nvidia encoder and it is also possible to make JPEG thumbnails of interlaced sources. The system will automatically identify and de-interlace interlaced sources, so no additional procedures are required from the user.

In order to keep the maximum video quality, it is recommended to always use progressive scan when possible.

JPEG thumbnail encoding using Nvidia GPUs

This release adds support for JPEG thumbnail encoding using a Nvidia GPU alongside the old Intel GPU implementation. This is especially important in cloud environments where the Intel CPUs usually don’t feature an integrated Intel GPU to do the JPEG encoding. The user can explicitly choose which implementation should encode the thumbnail in the REST API call, or leave the decision to the Ingest to select whichever implementation is supported by the hardware.

Agile Live 2.0.0

Fifth release of Agile Live in 2022.

Agile Live 2.0.0 is the second major release of the Agile Live system. This release contains several new features and bugfixes to improve the performance, stability and usability of the system.

See the Release documentation for more details.

New Rendering Engine

The 2.0.0 release ships with a brand new Rendering Engine, featuring a video mixer and a fundamental audio mixer. This makes it the first release of Agile Live to contain all you need to run a full broadcast production without the need for implementing some of the components yourself. The release still includes the SDK, which allows for custom Rendering Engine implementations for more advanced users.

Tally borders in multi-views

Tally borders are now drawn in the multi-view outputs and the views being preview or on air are marked with a green and a red frame, respectively. For custom Rendering Engines implementation, the SDK has a new API for controlling the tally border state.

Automatic reconnection to System Controller

The components in the system will now automatically try to reconnect to the System Controller, in case the connection goes down. This also means that the components can be started before the System Controller is started, and that the System Controller can easily be restarted after a fatal failure to reclaim control over the running system, without interrupting productions that are on air.

Enhanced system security

HTTPS is now supported in the System Controller to encrypt communication using the REST API as well as the connections from the System Controller to the components in the system. The REST API now also features a basic authentication system to only grant access to the actors with the correct credentials. Also, the components are authorized when connecting to the System Controller using a Pre-shared key (PSK) that must be provided at startup of the components. Read more about how to activate and use these features in the security tutorial

Agile Live 1.0.0

Fourth release of Agile Live in 2022.

Agile Live 1.0.0 is the first major release of the Agile Live system. This release contains no new features but bug fixes and stability improvements to make it ready for production.

See the Release documentation for more details.