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News
ACD News
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ESB3024 Release 1.10.1
A new maintenance release of ESB3024 Router with a couple of updates.
See the release notes
for more details.
ESB3024 Release 1.10.0
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
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
A new production release of the ACD Aggregator, ESB3032.
See the release notes for more details.
ESB3032 Release 1.0.0
The ESB3032 release is the first official release of the ACD Aggregator.
See the release notes for more details.
ESB3024 Release 1.0.0
The ESB3024 release is the first official release of the ACD Router.
See the release notes for more details.
ACP News
ESB3022 Release 1.0.0
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
We are happy to announce that the ESB3021, with today’s release, now supports live recodings. This release also includes increased ESB3005 compatibility, and several robustness improvements.
See the release notes for further details.
Edgeware CCMI URLs
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
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
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.
Agile Live News
Agile Live 6.0.0
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
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
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
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
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
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.