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BROADCAST : How to build your
own TV Channel with Open-Source &
other goodies
September 30, 2011 Nicolas Weil 32 comments
Here is our scenario : you are the technical director of a web startup, already having proven your talents with your
thematic VOD streaming channel and your boss suddenly thinks youre a grown enough company to jump on the
broadcast wagon and manage your own 24/7 live TV channel, targeting IPTV and multiplatform OTT, with a mix of
some live studio shows and mainly pre-recorded programs. And of course readify it for later iTV DTT distribution.
Quite an exciting challenge !
But once you passed the wow effect, you just realize that despite his high expectations for the TV channel, your boss
has got just a web budget which is close to 0$ and of course a tight launch schedule. Therefore, your first duty is
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to be creative on how to build the platform for the lowest possible cost : thats why, using your web reflexes, you
naturally turn yourself towards the open-source world to achieve this impossible mission. Inexpensive or free closedsource software will eventually fill the gaps (and obviously there are some).
Fortunately, the web attitude has contaminated many industries with its desire to promote interoperability and avoid
vendor lock-in with full-IP standard worflows. The BBC has shown the way for a long-time, funding many
developments like the Dirac codec for its own needs of tapeless workflows and open-sourcing them quickly
afterwards. Other TV channels like SVT from Sweden (with CasparCG) and many independent developers have
jumped onboard, and by combining their efforts with your usual web video tools like FFmpeg or other free tools, you
can for sure build the target platform.
Apart from this software layer, youll just need :
- commodity IT hardware to run all the software
- some inexpensive SDI cards
- the minimalistic general audio/video routing hardware & cables
- a reasonable amount of time to configure and interface all pieces
and of course the right IT/dev skills to bring it all together
OK, Lets build it now !
Screenwriting : Celtx
Website : www.celtx.com
Twitter : @celtx
Languages : JS, XUL
Licence : CePL
Platforms : Windows, Linux, Mac
Price : free (desktop app), with addons for $9.99
Commercial equivalents : Adobe Story and many others
Celtx is an all-in-one media pre-production system, allowing you to write scripts for shows and films, to build
storyboards and sketch setups, to schedule production and prepare roadbooks for the crew. While the desktop app is
free, three addons are available for purchase (Plot view, Full screen mode and Performance tracker). Interestingly, you
can also work on the go with their iOS mobile version ($4.99) or use their online service Studio to manage
collaborative team work ($4.99 per month up to 5 users), all the desktop and mobile apps datas being synchronized
with the Studio service. So their overall offer, while partly open-sourced, is very complete and affordable. What seems
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Prompter : Telekast
Website : telekast.sourceforge.net
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Licence : unknown
Platforms : Linux
Price : Free
Commercial equivalents : Many storage systems
Backblaze is a company providing backup service who opened source its storage pod design two years ago. While its
primarily aimed at building cloud storage facilities, it can also fit our goals with some adjustments but certainly not
for on-linear systems working in uncompressed HD in real-time. Anyway, this design seems OK at least for archiving
purposes, which is already a very good thing as using DLT for archiving needs expensive robots to be achieved. The
2nd generation storage pod designed by Backblaze costs $7.384 for 135 terabytes, it runs twice as fast as the first
generation design, costs $500 less for double capacity. The pods are running on Linux with JFS filesystem and the
RAID-6 volumes are accessed through HTTPS (Tomcat), each pod having its own IP. In their view NFS doesnt
scale well but it would be a necessary protocol to support for the archiving use case (as well as CIFS). Anyway, their
design is already a very good starting point for those who master the software part that runs on top of it !
DAM : EnterMedia
Website : entermediasoftware.com
Twitter : @EnterMedia_DAM
Languages : Java
Licence : LGPL
Platforms : Linux, Windows, OS X, Solaris
Price : free
Entermedia is a digital asset management that allows to organize, track and share video (and other audio, images and
text-based documents) assets through an online platform. It provides advanced metadata management and search
through the assets catalogs. All the data is tored in XML, thus avoiding by default the need for complex systems to
maintain it can also be plugged to MySQL or SQL Server if you wish so. It integrates FFmpeg, LAME and
ImageMagick for all video, audio and image conversion tasks.
If you are more on the PHP side of things, you can check Kaltura Community Edition which provides the backend
stuff and an impressive range of frontend APIs. An if you wish to have more control on your final platform, you can
take a look at MediaMosa which is based on Drupal and provides a SOA approach via a full REST integration, as
well as the usual FFmpeg integration. You can also find many more open source DAMs on this page : so much choice
but not all are suitable for video management
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SDI module. It also lets you read various formats such as DV, HDV, and TS over pipes. So it seems that with some
coding efforts, we can handle really complex playout scenarios thanks to MLT.
Graphics : CasparCG
As we have seen previously, CasparCG can be used for live production with camera switching and manual triggering
(via GUI remote control app) of Flash animations and Images/Text display as overlays on top of video. But thanks to
its extensive automation protocol Advanced Media Control Protocol (AMCP), CasparCG can be used in headless
mode to provide fully automated graphics playout for the TV channel. This is what SVT does for its channels with 40
CasparCG servers running 24/7 in automation mode. If SVT does, why not us ?
Workflow : Kamaelia
Website : www.kamaelia.org
Languages : Python
Licence : Apache Software Licence
Platforms : all Python compatible ones
Price : free
Kamaelia is a Python library by BBC Research for concurrent programming using a simple pattern of components that
send and receive data from each other. Axon is the root framework of Kamaelia, managing the components
concurrency. On top of this core, Kamaelia provides an extensive range of libraries for managing automation
mechanisms, audio manipulation, codec work, DVB tables and streams management, integrates many internet or
video streaming protocols (unicast or multicast), alongside many utils and visualisation libs to build your perfect
workflow system. Nothing is packaged as a ready-to-go product, but thats OK for you as you Pyhton master like
to build custom systems with powerful libraries !
Head-End
IPTV Encoding : Open Broadcast Encoder
Website : code.google.com/p/open-broadcast-encoder/
Twitter : @obencoder
Languages : C
Licence : GPL
Platforms : Linux
Price : Free
Lead by Kieran Kunhya, a developer from the x264 project, Open Broadcast Encoder has the ambition to free
broadcasters from the vendors inertia and provide x264 state of the art video encoding features combined to other
great libraries such as libmpegts and FFmpeg. So the Realtime version of OBE (there is also a special version for
VOD encoding) provides 8/10 bits AVC encoding or MPEG-2 (with s262) and soon VP8 (with xvp8), multiformat
audio encoding (MP2/AC3/AAC/Dolby-E), and is compatible with DeckLink/Linsys/Dektec cards for SD/HD SDI
input. Inputs can also be one of the various IP possibilities like UDP, UDP/RTP unicast and multicast, RTSP or
RTMP. It can also be DVB-ASI/T/C/S with the corresponding cards. As regards transport capabilities, OBE can
stream in UDP/RTP unicast and multicast, and soon DVB-ASI (with extra Dektec or Linsys card). Statmux pools for
MP2/H.264 are currently in development and the system already provides a SNMP control interface.
While it has a cmdline-only interface for the moment, the API will provide a convenient way of building web
frontends when it will be released. OBE can safely go in production right now only for SD encoding, because HD
still requires some minor work, mainly on the x264 side of it. To accelerate, OBE needs to widen its developer base
after the initial commitment of two broadcasters alongside Kierans efforts. Anyway, its a great project that has to be
closely monitored, as it will finally provide all the features of very expensive encoders on the market.
Multiplexing/HbbTV : OpenCaster
Website : www.avalpa.com
Languages : Python
Licence : GPL
Platforms : Linux
Price : Free
Commercial equivalents : httvStream HbbTV, Icareus Playout, MIT-xperts iMux Multiplexer
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OpenCaster is a 3 years old product (since version 1.0), developped by Italian company Avalpa who offers a
packaged product (hardware+software, additional web GUIs) built around OpenCaster. Its a transport stream data
generator & packet manipulator which can (re)multiplex transport streams in multicast and include data carousels in it.
OpenCaster can output carousels using different iTV standards : Ginga, MHP, MHEG, OTA and of course HbbTV
and it support the most interesting feature of carousels, the real-time event insertion (aka do-it-now events in HbbTV).
As regards the muxing capacities, it supports MPEG-2 and H.264 video streams and DTS or AC3 5.1 audio streams
and allows many kinds of clock manipulations on PCR, PTS and DTS timestamps. Apart from playing PSI/SI/SIT
tables and data carousels, OpenCaster can also playout local A/V files with supported media essences. It therefore
allows basic playout features, maybe useful to switch to fallback files in case your TS stream is broken on the encoder
side. Pure failover between two TS encoders could also be achieved in a similar way. Dektec DVB in/out cards are
fully supported. Its definitely a great product for prototyping your service freely but a more featured version may be
required to go in production on large scale.
Okay, I hope that this article was a good bootstraper for your upcoming TV channel and that, apart from the
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code back-contributions that you shall do in some cases, you will donate a part of the money you will have
saved to the great open source projects listed (or not) on this page !
Nicolas Weil
Digital Media Solutions Architect, France, World.
Hungry for : OTT challenges, streaming experiments, synchronized second-screen
services, scalable production/distribution platforms & groovy music.
Proud member of OVFSquad !
More Posts - Website - Twitter - LinkedIn
Broadcast, Frameworks, Open Source, Tools automation, broadcast workflow, color ranking, DAM, HbbTV, IPTV,
live graphics, live production, NLE, open-source, OTT, playout, script-writing
Comments (32)
Trackbacks (7)
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about as close to a professional video playback system as you can get for free. Plus, if you do any sort of live
presentations, this is a great resource!
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