Reaching a Broader AudienceLive Internet broadcasts deliver content

to mobile and PC-based devices andincrease revenue potential

Visionary broadcasters are catering to digital consumers, who demand content

at anytime, whether or not they’re sitting in front of a television screen. With the

Internet, viewers can watch programs from any screen, at any time and from nearly

anywhere. The web is delivering breaking news, movies, television programming

and sports highlights on mobile devices, media phones, computers and even high

definition television sets in the living room. Today’s technology helps content creators,

programmers and distributors expand their audiences, create new revenue opportunities

and attract advertisers.

Live video streaming technology is being used to serve a large audience of engaged

baseball enthusiasts, who want access to out-of-market Major League Baseball (MLB)

games. These baseball fans can subscribe to MLB.com and keep tabs on thousands

of games in a season – an unmatched baseball experience. MLB.com sends live video

streams that are optimized for their subscribers’ network bandwidth and screen

size. “With such a rapidly growing subscriber base of fully-engaged and dedicated

viewers, we’re always pushing to deliver higher-quality live streaming content with

new, interactive features,” said Joe Inzerillo, senior vice president, multimedia and

distribution, MLB.com.

Technical Brief Live Video Streaming

Technical BriefLive Video StreamingEncoding Solutions from Inlet Technologies

Intel® Xeon® Processors with Quad-Core Technology

Watching Live Events from the Web

Before viewers can watch live events on devices connected to the

Internet, there’s a lot of behind the scenes video processing taking

place. First, the event is captured and sent to a video encoder, which

is the Inlet Spinnaker* in Figure 1. Spinnaker receives the content in

either high or standard definition format, encodes it into different

video stream formats, including VC-1/Windows* Media and H.264.

Next, Spinnaker sends the streams, with different bit rates and

resolutions, to the media server. Distributing streams to literally

thousands of viewers, the media server selects and sends video

streams that best match the bandwidth and screen capabilities of

individual devices.

Spinnaker is highly reliable and robust and offers unique capabilities

for new media broadcast over IP. It was developed by Inlet

Technologies, a leader in advanced encoding solutions for new

media. Supporting resolutions from mobile to web to high definition

television, Spinnaker is a flexible, multi-format, scalable professional

streaming solution. It also provides industry-leading quality for

live media delivery applications such as live sports and other web

streaming; broadband and mobile TV; IPTV; enterprise, public,

education and government (PEG) video.

Choosing a Video Streaming Solution

In many ways, the selection criteria for video encoding solutions are

similar to other networking gear, like security appliances and routers.

Video streaming equipment should be reliable and easy to manage,

features that are essential to maintain service to customers. And

service providers need a scalable solution that can easily increase

capacity, especially since streaming live video is a relatively new

service category with great expansion potential. A summary of key

selection criteria for video streaming equipment is listed in Table 1.

Selection Criteria Impact

Video Quality Attract and retain viewers

Flexibility Service a wide array of devices

Scalability Add capacity cost-effectively

Manageability Increase availability and lower TCO

Table 1: Video Streaming Equipment Selection Criteria

In addition to satisfying viewers’ quality expectations, video

streaming solutions should be flexible, scalable and manageable. High

video quality is essential for creating a true broadcast experience that

draws in and retains viewers. Quality is boosted by flexible streaming

systems that offer differentiated quality of service (QoS) for TV

and a wide array of new media devices. This is accomplished when

video solutions stream the optimal bit rate and resolution based on

the capabilities of the viewer’s device. Service providers also want

scalable, energy-efficient streaming solutions that increase capacity

cost-effectively and can be managed remotely to keep systems up

and running.

These system requirements are met by advanced encoding and

transcoding solutions from Inlet Technologies that enable content

providers to reach new audiences through live and on-demand

professional streaming over any IP network. Encoding is the process

of converting uncompressed, unencrypted video captured from

professional recording equipment into one of a variety of formats

for playback. This technical brief reviews selection criteria for video

streaming systems and describes how Inlet Technologies tuned

its video processing software for optimal performance on an Intel®

Xeon® processor-based server platform with quad-core technology.

Video Streaming Trends

The sports industry is one of the fastest growing segments for

streaming live video content on the Web. Online sports video streams

and downloads served in the U.S. market are projected to more than

double by 2012, from 5.2 billion in 2007 to 10.8 billion, according to a

recent study by Screen Digest.

Video streaming is catching on in all geographies. In the Netherlands,

Cross Media produced and managed ten live streams from the 2008

Wimbledon tennis championships over the NET5 station Web site.

Sports content is some of the most challenging to encode due to

its almost constant motion. Cross Media also streamed a November

concert with pianist Jorge Luis Prast at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw.

“We only considered Spinnaker for this particular application due to its

exceptional quality,” said Raymond Garnier, managing director of Cross

Media Ventures. “Europeans are passionate about music, so the sound

as well as the picture must be superior.”

Technical Brief Live Video Streaming

Figure 1. Streaming Live Events to Web

Laptop

Smart Phone

PC

Mac IPTV

Any IP Device

MediaServer

Web GUISNMP

Front Panel

Remote EncoderManagement

HD/SD-SDIVideoAudio

Captioning

AnalogVideoAudio

Captioning

Inlet Spinnaker

VC-1

Flash 8 (VP6)

H.264

MP4ASF

RTMP StreamMPEG-2 Transport Stream

SilverlightFlash

Unlike other networking equipment, video encoder performance is

judged visually, and the lack of quality, like reduced frames per second

(FPS), jumps right out at viewers. Some video streaming solutions

deliver content that’s tailored to the capabilities of the end device;

this is a level of service differentiation and flexibility that is atypical of

other networking equipment.

Putting Computing Power to Work

High quality video transcoding, the process of changing digital

content from one format to another, is compute intensive. When

video transcoding is coupled with live video streaming, the processing

requirements increase further because everything must happen

in real-time. To help meet these requirements, Spinnaker performs

preprocessing to provide best-in-class output. Content providers

and distributors can control preprocessing and customize the output

for target devices using features such as scaling, cropping, Inverse

Telecine and compression.

• Scaling – Change the horizontal and vertical resolutions

independently.

• Cropping – Reframe the image to accentuate or remove some

content or change the aspect ratio.

•InverseTelecine – Convert back to the original frame rate of a

movie (e.g., from NTSC’s 29.97 FPS to 23.98 FPS).

• AdvancedCompressionSettings – Allows for a better quality

video stream in a smaller amount of bandwidth.

The Spinnaker interface exposes more of the advanced compression

settings for each of the codecs, allowing unprecedented flexibility to

optimize the output stream for specific content, network and latency

requirements. Inlet encoding software allows service providers to

set critical parameters, as illustrated by one of several user interface

screens shown in Figure 2. To provide this high level of video

streaming functionality, Inlet uses the latest Intel Xeon processors

because they supply the computing horsepower required by its

demanding encoding and transcoding algorithms.

Figure 2. Setting Inlet Encoding Software Parameters

Developing with Intel® Technology

Inlet software runs on hardware platforms equipped with two Intel

Xeon processors with quad-core technology, eight processor cores

total, as shown in Figure 3. The platform supplies the computing

power, memory size, I/O capacity and 64-bit architecture required

to handle multiple input formats and bit rates. For example, HDTV

content may come in at 30 frames per second with a 1280x720

frame size and 16 bits per pixel. The platform receives the content

on high speed I/O ports, copies it into memory, compresses it, and

then sends it back out. The 64-bit Intel® architecture approximately

doubles the capacity to both move and process data as compared to

32-bit architectures.

Twenty-eight lanes of PCI Express* I/O connect to multiple high

speed Ethernet ports (e.g., 10 gigabits per second), transferring

data in and out at very fast line rates. This high level of hardware

performance allows multi-format encoding and transcoding to be

performed in software, not hardware. Conversely, platforms that

rely on customized hardware silicon for video processing often need

additional components for each content format they support, which

adds cost and reduces flexibility.

Inlet took advantage of several Intel® technologies that increase

system performance and ease software tuning, as shown in Table 2.

“Intel’s Quad-Core® architecture enables smaller form factors and lower power consumption, which

reduce physical space and cooling requirements in order to help service providers lower their operating cost,”

Doug DavisVice PresidentDigital Enterprise GroupIntel Corporation

Intel® 5000PMemory

Controller Hub

Intel®6321E50

I/O ControllerHub

Quad-CoreIntel® Xeon®Processor

5400 Series

Configurable PCI Express®with 28 lanes

DDR2 FB-DIMM

DDR2 FB-DIMM

DDR2 FB-DIMM

DDR2 FB-DIMM

Up to 2x1333 MHz

Configurable up to64 GB max. memory

Quad-CoreIntel® Xeon®Processor

5400 Series

Figure 3. Intel Multi-Core Platform

Maximizing System Performance

Inlet software is optimized to run on Intel Xeon processors by

breaking up algorithms that compress and decompress data, called

codecs, into multiple software threads. This means an algorithm

is split into different pieces that execute on the processor

simultaneously, which can dramatically cut overall processing time.

With all eight processor cores working in unison for one broadcast

(e.g., baseball game), Spinnaker can encode multiple bit rate outputs

simultaneously – for example, 400, 800 and 1,200 kilobits per second

(Kbps) – an optimized end-user experience.

Inlet’s latest hardware platform, the Spinnaker 7000, took advantage

of Intel® Software Development Products to achieve the marketing

goal of outputting High Definition (HD) video at 1280 x 720

resolution at 30 frames per second. Initial tests showed the maximum

frame rate achieved was less than 20 FPS, so Inlet used the Intel®

VTune™ Performance Analyzer to search for software performance

issues. The analyzer helped Inlet identify bottlenecks in the code,

optimize the number of threads and balance the workload across all

eight processor cores, which achieved true HD output capability.

“Inlet’s Spinnaker allows us to produce multi-platform video at up to 1.2 megabits per second, up from just 700 kilobits per second in 2007, a dramatic enhancement of video quality and overall user experience.”

Joe Inzerillo Senior Vice President Multimedia and Distribution MLB.com

Intel Technology Inlet Software Implementation

Intel® Xeon® Processors The encoding workload is evenly divided among the processingwith quad-core technology cores, which fully utilizes the available computing power.

Streaming SIMD Extensions The software uses instructions optimized for video processing,(SSE) Instructions which decreases processing time.

64-bit Architecture Instructions handle 64 bits at a time (versus 32 bits), which nearly

doubles the speed of many operations.

Intel® Integrated Performance Inlet uses Intel software functions, which are highly optimized toPrimitives (Intel® IPP) yield exceptional video performance.

Intel® VTune™ The analyzer helps Inlet identify and address bottlenecks in thePerformance Analyzer software, which improves performance.

Table 2: Inlet Puts Intel Technologies to Work

Technical Brief Live Video Streaming

The performance advantage from using quad-core processors is

illustrated in Figure 4, which compares two generations of Inlet

hardware platforms. Inlet’s recent platform, based on two Intel® Xeon®

processors 5410 (Figure 2) with quad-core technology, has double

the performance of a prior platform equipped with two Intel® Xeon®

processors 51402 with dual-core technology. The test measured

the number of 640x480 streams1 each platform could output while

running Inlet’s encoding software.

Parallel Instructions Increase Performance

Inlet’s encoding software can convert video content into Microsoft*

Windows* Media format, which supports high quality, interactive video

across the Web and mobile devices. To speed up development, Inlet

640x480 Streams

1

2

3

4

5

Intel® Xeon® Processor 5140with Dual-Core technology

Higher is better

Intel® Xeon® Processor 5410with Quad-Core technology

Figure 4. Performance Comparison of Two Intel® Xeon® Processor-based Systems

uses Microsoft’s Windows Media software development kit (SDK). The

SDK makes extensive use of Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions (Intel®

SSE) instructions, which will operate on several pieces of data in parallel.

Recently, Microsoft updated their SDK to use Intel® Streaming SIMD

Extensions 4 (Intel® SSE4) instructions, and Inlet measured a 10

percent improvement in the overall system performance. “Individual

components probably sped up much more on a percentage basis, but

Intel SSE4 effectively meant we got the equivalent of a one speed

grade faster processor,” says Scott Thorley, senior product marketing

manager at Inlet Technologies.

Intel Software Library Shortens Development Time

In order to encode a high quality video stream in real

time, the majority of the processor computing power

must be dedicated to encoding and compression. But

before encoding can begin, some preprocessing is

required, like cropping the video signal to the right

sizeandapplyingcolorconversion,andfiltering.

These functions are available in the Intel® Integrated

Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP) library, and Inlet

uses them for several reasons, including:

•Thepreprocessingfunctionsareoptimizedforthe

Intel processors, so more of the computing time is

spent encoding.

•SinceIntelprovidesproduction-readyfunctions,

Inlet’s developers can spend more time creating

new value-added features.

Flexibility Increases Audience Reach

Audience reach depends on the number of serviceable devices, such

as mobile phones, media phones, MIDs, PCs/laptops and televisions.

In order to optimize the video quality for as many devices as possible,

the Inlet Spinnaker encoder allows the content provider to encode

a single video source into four streams. These streams, typically at

different resolutions and bit rates, are sent to a media server, which

selects the best stream for each device. Real-time streaming statistics

are available via Inlet’s user-friendly tools, as shown in Figure 5.

Spinnaker encodes multiple formats in one box, including Windows

Media Video (WMV), VC-1, MPEG-4, H.264, Flash, MPEG-2 and AVI

formats, so content providers can reach virtually any end-user. Since

Spinnaker encoding software runs on standard 1RU servers, it can

support more formats cost-effectively than competitive offerings

that use hardware encoding technology. Software encoding also

Figure 5. Inlet Encoding Software User Interface

allows Spinnaker systems to be easily upgraded in the future with

additional formats as they become available, as opposed to hardware-

based encoding solutions that charge extra or require a new purchase

for each additional format.

Scalability Grows Capacity

Spinnaker software runs on dense, state of the art hardware 1RU

rack mount servers. The energy efficiency of Intel Xeon processors

with quad-core technology enables this small form factor, which

accommodates racks of twenty servers. Each server supports

one video source, so a service provider can easily scale to twenty

broadcast channels within a single cost-effective rack.

Remote Manageability Improves Operations

No one wants to see a blank screen, so it’s critical that streaming

systems continue to run smoothly. Remote management allows IT

personnel to respond to issues quickly and get systems back online.

Spinnaker provides a highly efficient management console through

local, web and SNMP interfaces. It can be managed through the

Internet from anywhere using a web based graphical user interface

(GUI). The interface allows for remote management, configuration

and scheduling. There are enterprise class alarms that pinpoint errors

quickly, such as a dysfunctional video source, a full hard disk drive and

other system problems.

Adaptive Streaming in the Future

The next big technology breakthrough in live video streaming will be

adaptive streaming. This is the ability to stream the event at multiple

bit rates, with the user device automatically switching streams to

always play the best quality stream based on the available bandwidth.

If user bandwidth goes down, rather than pausing and buffering, the

user device will opt for a video stream encoded at a lower bit rate.

Once the bandwidth recovers, the device automatically goes back to

the higher quality stream. Adaptive Streaming will be available from

Inlet Technologies in early 2009.

Extending the Reach

Live video streaming creates new business opportunities for content

providers and distributors. The underlying video technologies, encoding

and transcoding, are computationally intensive and require the high

computing performance supplied by multi-core processors, like Intel

Xeon processors with quad-core technology. These processors enable

Inlet Technologies to offer very high quality encoding performance,

flexibility, scalability and manageability. Since Inlet’s encoding solutions

are software-based, they offer greater flexibility than most hardware

solutions without sacrificing performance. The Inlet Spinnaker

encoding solution delivers stunning High Definition picture quality

across today’s IP and broadband networks. Now, content creators

can offer viewers a “living room” experience over the Web, reaching a

whole new set of mobile and PC users.

Technical Brief Live Video Streaming

1Performance tests and ratings are measured using specific computer systemsand/or components and reflect approximate performance of Intel products asmeasured by those tests. Any difference in system hardware or software design or configurationmayaffectactualperformance.Buyersshouldconsultothersourcesof information to evaluate the performance of systems or components they are considering purchasing. For more information on performance tests and on the performance of Intel products, visit http://www.intel.com/performance/resources/benchmark_limitations.htm

2SystemConfigurationDetails

© 2009 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, and Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

Printed in USA 0209/MS/SD/XX/PDF Please Recycle Order No. 321408-001US

www.intel.com

Appendix: Inlet Spinnaker Hardware Platforms

Recent Generation Prior Generation Intel® Xeon® processor Intel® Xeon® processorProcessor 5410 with Quad-Core 5140 with Dual-Core technology technology

Total number of processors 2 2

Total number of processing cores 8 4

Chipset Intel® 5000P Memory Intel® 5000P Memory

Controller Hub Controller Hub

System Memory 2 gigabyte FB-DIMM 1 gigbayte FB-DIMM