Last week was a busy time for the SRT community. Dozens of engineers around the world took part in the second SRT InterOp Plugfest of 2020, an online event aimed at providing opportunities to test interoperability and compatibility between different technologies using the SRT protocol.

Since the last SRT Plugfest in May 2020, many new companies have joined the SRT Alliance, which now counts more than 450 members. The event began with a webinar, hosted by Haivision’s SRT Solutions Architect Justus Rogmann, SRT Alliance Director Suso Carillo, and Haivision’s VP of Engineering Marc Cymontkowski, exploring the latest developments and milestones of the SRT protocol – you can watch the webinar recording here.

A major highlight of the Plugfest was the involvement of Telestream and the availability of their new Telestream Cloud | Stream Monitoring Service to probe any point for the SRT workflows on any cloud.

Since May this year, the community in the main SRT Slack channel has grown from 800 members to 1195. With high participation anticipated, we had to extend the December Plugfest by a day, as people continued to join the event, bringing more and more devices online for testing.

Conclusion: SRT is Interoperable, Globally

It was a good thing that the virtual event was extended by a day – over 700 individual device-to-device tests were performed; almost double the 378 tests performed in the last Plugfest in May. Over 40 different vendors joined the event, providing 47 devices to be tested with each other. In the short time available, not all devices could be tested, but over 700 device-to-device tests is an amazing number achieved. What’s more, throughout these device-to-device tests, not a single incompatibility was found between different implementations of the SRT protocol.

Highlights

Justus Rogmann highlights what made this Plugfest so special.

To work with so many brilliant engineers from so many different countries is a really special opportunity. Connecting not only devices, but also people across borders, time zones, firewalls, and language barriers is at the heart of open source technologies like the SRT protocol. My personal highlight was seeing the Eiffel Tower with glowing red skies during sunset, provided in a stream from ActuaFilms, based in Paris. Unfortunately, I only took a screenshot the next morning.

Furthermore, the level of detail provided by some contributors was amazing, for example, the test setup provided by JVC in their lab in the US East coast from where they provided SRT streams from the JVC GY-HC500 PTZ Camera to be tested by others.

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But most important to me were the results; SRT simply works, even over bad networks! Especially with the pandemic and people working from home, SRT has become a real problem solver. Even during this Plugfest most people, myself included, were working from home. Some of the devices tested were just placed on my desk and streams sent via my DSL line – without any problems!

Last but not least, the collaboration with Telestream to launch stream probes at any point in the participants’ SRT workflows on any cloud was a game-changer. Not only did SRT prove interoperability confidence across more than 40 vendors, but broadcasters and streamers now have the confidence of stream integrity at every point in their multi-vendor workflow. Please watch the webinar for Kenneth Herron’s hands-on demonstration of the Telestream Could | Stream Monitoring Service in conjunction with Haivision Hub.

The Results Matrix

We’re working on the results in a preliminary matrix, which shows successful SRT connections and video transmissions between the many devices tested. We kindly ask all contributors to review and report updates or errors. If you have not published your test results yet, please get in contact with Justus Rogmann, (@jrogmann) so he can add any missing information. Please remember the SRT-Alliance Slack channel #interop is always open and that tests can be performed at any time.

Special Thanks

A special thank you goes to the following vendors, partners, and SRT Alliance members for taking part, and contributing to a successful SRT InterOp Plugfest: ActuaFilms, AJA, AVer, Avid, D2D Technologies, Drastic, DTV Innovations, Epiphan, Evertz, Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Intenor, JVC, Kiloview, LiveX, LTN Global, Lumens, MediaAtmos, Net Insight, Net-Zeal, OBS, Quickstream Node, SAPEC, SIENNA, Softvelum, Telestream, ToolsOnAir, vMix and many more. And let’s not forget the many diligent developers of this open source project! You rock!

Wishing all our members Happy Holidays and warmest wishes for 2021.