In my Display Daily on February 11, I discussed the (slow) progress on open standards for Video over IP (VoIP). I mentioned that one of the barriers to open standard VoIP is the existence of proprietary VoIP solutions. One such solution comes from Aurora Multimedia (Morganville, NJ) and is called by the trademarked name IPBaseT.
While they make a variety of products, Aurora’s lead product line in the VoIP space is their IPX series. Key properties of the IPX series include:
- 4K2K streaming over 10G fiber
- Zero compression and zero latency
- 128×128 w/HDCP distributed routing
- Larger configurations supported without HDCP
- Seamless video and audio
- Breakaway switching
- Dante IP audio option
- 10G SFP+ (supports single of multimode fiber)
- 1G RJ45 LAN w/PoE
The lead products in the IPX series are the IPX-TC1 and the IPX-TXW3EU. The IPX-TC1 can act as either a transmitter or a receiver and will support a video bandwidth of 340MHz, which is enough for video up to 4K2K 4:2:0 @60Hz. It also supports up to 32 channels of audio. There also is a SO-DIMM options card slot for ExtermeUSB (USB over IP) or Dante Audio options. In a typical installation, there would be one IPX-TC1 in each room with a display on the network. The companion IPX-TXW3EU is a wall input device that accepts HDMI, DisplayPort or VGA video inputs and convert them to the VoIP data stream. In a conference room, this would, for example, accept video from a laptop or other source and route it through a standard Ethernet switch to the display. This display is not necessarily in the same room as the source and the video can be routed to any display on the network.
Figure 1 Aurora three-room VoIP network using IPBaseT technology with three IPX-TC1’s, three IPX-TXW3EU’s and a standard 10G Ethernet router.
The IPX-TC1 is based on the BlueRiver NT Chipset from AptoVision (St Laurent, QC, Canada). The BlueRiver NT Chipset which was first publicly announced January 13, 2015 and already has multiple design wins. Besides Aurora Multimedia (booth 4-T18), a number of companies will be showing or discussing products with the BlueRiver NT chipset at ISE in Amsterdam February 10 – 12. These include DVI-Gear (1-F44), Grandbeing (booth 10-S122), IDK Corporation (booth 9-C111) Opticomm-EMCORE (booth 10-K123) and ZeeVee (booth 10-N149).
“Aurora Multimedia needed an uncompressed IP-based AV transmission technology with no latency as the foundation for its new IPBaseT platform,” said Paul Harris, CEO of Aurora Multimedia. “Not only is AptoVision’s Blue River NT chipset the only technology to meet this requirement, it also delivers on our vision of the future in which IP based systems will transform the AV signal distribution market.”
“As a young company providing the most important piece of technology for any AV signal distribution system, we are proud to have secured the trust and confidence of our partners within such a short period of time,” said Kamran Ahmed, CEO and co-founder of AptoVision. “Our chipsets are redefining the AV signal distribution system and these companies are taking a leadership role in bringing this new paradigm to market.”
Aurora Multimedia was founded in 1997. The company started with the introduction of the industry’s first non-proprietary web-standards based IP control systems and touch panels, and its product line includes HDBaseT video distribution solutions as well as IPBaseT. In addition to video distribution, the product line includes advanced audio/video processors with scaling, multi-image rotation and dual/quad display processing. Aurora Multimedia provides solutions for a variety of global markets including government, education, security, hospitality, corporate and house of worship.
AptoVision, a privately held company, says that advancement in hi-definition display technologies is changing the way professional AV equipment is being used in commercial environments. In particular, the rapid change in consumer electronics technologies is driving Pro-AV growth. AptoVision is redefining the AV signal processing & distribution platform through its BlueRiver technology and FPGA-based chipsets. Integrating its unique IP, the BlueRiver platform delivers 50% to 80% reduction in system costs and up to 10x performance gains over comparable solutions, according to the company. The platform also enables the only products in the world which scale with current and evolving AV signal distribution requirements for ultra-high definition & ultra-high bandwidth video, multi-format support, multi-video transmission, & advanced pixel processing. –Matthew Brennesholtz
