Last week was a busy week for the SRT community thanks to the SRT Plugfest, an online event aimed at providing opportunities to test interoperability and compatibility between different technologies using the SRT protocol. I spoke with the Plugfest organizer and moderator, Haivision SRT Solutions Architect, Justus Rogmann, to find out what happened during this three-day event. To learn more about the event and the future roadmap for SRT, watch the webinar.

An Engaged and Growing Community

Following the webinar, this year’s event kicked off with a flurry of activity on the SRTAlliance.org Slack which now counts almost 800 members. Plugfest communications took place in the #interop channel and there were 22 companies who were actively engaged in sharing and testing SRT transmissions with other participants.

Highlights and Results

The biggest highlight was that during the 3 days of testing, there was not one single failure and no incompatibilities detected using SRT. No matter what vendor or version of SRT was tested, connections were always made. During the Plugfest at least 378 individual “device to device” tests were performed using:

• 15 different encoding devices/software solutions (including Panasonic AW-UE100 PTZ camera with native SRT output)
• 7 different gateways/transcoders
• 18 different decoding devices/software solutions

From the outset, SRT was designed to be content and codec agnostic, but it was still exciting to see how SRT was being tested for new use cases such as NDI over SRT.

Another highlight was that participants had the opportunity to test one of the first, yet to be released cameras, with native SRT output and that does not require an additional encoder. There was much excitement among the different vendors when it came to testing the new Panasonic AW-UE100 PTZ camera.

Testing streams coming from Cinegy through Haivision Hub (referred to as SRT Hub in May 2020)

Detailed statistics of an SRT stream coming from Radiant through a Haivision SRT Gateway

Test setup on a table at Dream Chip in Germany

We will be sharing the results of the testing in a compatibility matrix soon, watch this space for more details!

Thank You

A massive thank you to the following vendors, partners, and SRT Alliance members for taking part and contributing to a successful SRT Plugfest: Cabletime, Cinegy, D2D Technologies, Dream Chip Technologies, Epiphan, Changsha Kiloview Electronics, GlobalM, Haivision, Microsoft, Newtek, Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), Panasonic, Radiant Communications Corporation, Sienna, STUDIOCOAST PTY LTD (Vmix), Techex, Telestream, Tellyo, Tividoo, VideoLAN (VLC), X-Pert Multimedia Solutions, Yourside

SRT 2020 Vision
To get all the details about the origins of SRT, Haivision’s partnership with Microsoft as well as an exclusive preview of the SRT roadmap, watch the webinar.