We have reported on Aptovision and its BlueRiver video over IP technology nine times since last year’s ISE show (in brief, if you’ve missed it, the technology uses proprietary technology to deliver video from HDMI sources over ethernet in a low-latency, uncompressed mode to allow the use of relatively low cost 10Gb ethernet switches, rather than dedicated video switchers. A typical FullHD uncompressed stream at 60P is around 3Gbps. Aptovision has its own light compression system which compresses with “mathematically lossless” compression of 1.4:1).
The company organised a couple of panel sessions that discussed the development of AV over IP and our own Managing Editor, Bob Raikes, moderated those panels. At the event, it was pointed out that “commodity” 10Gb switches are selling at prices down to $100 per port, which compares to at least $500 (and up to $1,500) per port for dedicated AV switches. The architecture also allows complete flexibility – each port can act as an input, an output or both. Cabling is via the standard levels of UTP needed for 10Gb networking (or can be any solution such as fibre). Further, out of the 10Gb, an AV-based network can allocate a 1Gb channel for data networking, allowing a single physical network for A/V and data.
Although many systems are available with lossy compression, Aptovision has found that a lot of applications, such as security recording and control rooms, really benefit from the correct captured pixel being transmitted to the display, processing or recording system. With the original pixel, further processing such as digital zoom may be possible, while these techniques rarely work well on images that have been compressed in a lossy way.
At the show, Aptovision also had its own booth and has a new “Plethora” chip set that supports the scaling that may be needed or desired at the input or output end. This can allow different resolutions to be created from a single received stream. The hardware is “almost complete” and should be available at the end of Q1. Later, the company will add multiview for compositing multiple inputs for video wall applications. The Plethora chip will also deal with multiple formats such as RGB, YUV 4:2:0, or YUV 4:2:2 as well as frame rate conversion.
Analyst Comment
Aptovision has HDBaseT in its sights and wants to replace it as a way of transmitting HDMI. One of the key issues, as it is with the Valens technology, is that the end points are proprietary even though, in the case of HDBaseT, it has been adopted in a standard. Barco Silex was also showing video over ip, but using a standards-based approach. (ISE 2016 Roundup) (BR)
