VoD Services

Using the SmartMEDIA media server, IPTV/OTT service providers can develop a wide range of services for their subscribers, the entire list of which can be generalized to the following services: LiveTV (multicast), VoD and nDVR.

VoD Services

VoD (Video on Demand) is a set of services for targeted video content delivery (for example, movies, serials, etc.) to end-user devices using IP networks. For VoD-services the content should be properly prepared (transcoded, segmented, encrypted and indexed) and stored in a storage for future transfer to the devices. These steps are implemented in SmartMEDIA as follows:

VoD Content Preparation Stages

1. Segmenting and Playlist Generation

VoD content should be segmented into chunks according to MPEG-DASH and HLS protocols. Chunked content will be packaged in TS and/or MP4 containers and recorded to the storage.

Requirements for Source Files

Supported containers:

• SPTS MPEG2-TS (ISO/IEC 13818-1, ITU-T);
• MP4/ISO BMFF (ISO/IEC 14496-12 — MPEG-4 Part 12);
• MKV (Matroska).

Supported codecs:

• AAC, AC3, DTS — for audio;
• H.262/MPEG2, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC — for video.

Additional requirements:

• If you’re going to use adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR), all video streams should have the same GOP structure and have synchronous key frames (I-frames).
• The value of DTS counters for audio and video samples should not differ by more than 1.5 seconds.
• The value of DTS counters should increase monotonically.
• If the PMT table in the MPEG2-TS container was changed, a table version change is required.
• There should be no CC errors in the TS-stream.

POSIX-compatible file systems are supported.

Playlists with chunk references and other metadata will be generated as well as media files. Playlists will be stored in the same directory as the chunks.

2. Encryption

To protect against unauthorized playback and copying, content can be encrypted. In this case, the encryption will be applied before writing to the storage.

At the moment, supported encryption standard is ISO/IEC 23001-7: 2015 Part 7 (Common encryption in ISO base media file format files); the ISO BMFF/MP4 Fragmented container is supported. Any CENC-compatible DRM system can be used, for example Google Widevine or Microsoft PlayReady.

3. Content Playback

The subscriber device requests the playlists and chunks via the HTTP protocol and plays them. The solution includes an nginx HTTP server, which performs content delivery.