SmartMEDIA Introduction

Download PDF

The SmartMEDIA media server, developed by SmartLabs, is designed to deliver video content over IP networks. It provides transcoding, segmentation, encryption, recording and delivery of audio/video content for both managed IP (IPTV) and unmanaged IP (OTT) networks.

SmartMEDIA supports a variety of streaming protocols (MPEG-DASH, HLS, RTSP), video resolutions (from SD to UHD) and codecs (H.262/MPEG-2, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, various audio codecs, etc.), allows you to deliver media content to a wide range of subscriber devices and players, including set-top boxes, browsers, Smart TVs, Apple iOS devices, Android devices, etc.

Solutions based on SmartMEDIA can automatically distribute the load between video servers depending on the client’s location and requested content for high performance and fault tolerance. This allows you to build distributed video content delivery networks (CDN) in particular.

SmartMEDIA architecture (click to enlarge)

Key Features of SmartMEDIA 

• High scalability with support for both centralized and distributed solutions.
• High reliability due to the ability to build failover clusters with no single point of failure.
• Deploy the hardware platform quickly and easily with standard servers and storage systems.
• A wide range of supported formats (from SD to UHD), codecs (H.262/MPEG-2, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC and others), as well as integration with popular content protection systems and subscriber devices.
• The SmartMEDIA media server software is running Linux on top of the x86_64 platform.

Software Versions

The difference between the SmartMEDIA Legacy and SmartMEDIA Ultra versions is the support for the feature “CENC->CVBS On-the-fly Re-encryption” by the Ultra version.

This feature is intended to re-encrypt MP4 chunks prepared for adaptive streaming (HLS or DASH) from one encryption scheme to another “on the fly”, i.e. without saving the re-encrypted copy to the repository. This saves disk space by storing only one copy of encrypted content (for example, for Widevine DRM). At the same time, players using a different content protection system (for example, Apple FairPlay DRM) can also decrypt and play this content. Currently, reencryption from the cenc scheme (AES-CTR) to the cbcs scheme (AES-CBC with template encryption) is supported according to the standard ISO/IEC 23001-7 “Common encryption in ISO BMFF files”.