Extron has released its pro AV over IP range of products. We bring you an exclusive, in depth look at what sets the Extron NAV apart from other competitors on the market. There is no denying the fact that AV over IP is an extremely congested product vertical. All the major AV players, and many more to boot, have gone to market with their solutions. One name has been conspicuous for its absence - Extron. Now, it too has joined the fray with the announcement of its NAV pro AV over IP streaming solution.
The NAV will be available in 1Gb and 10Gb versions and will support transmission of up to 4K60 4:4:4 video signals. What is of interest is how Extron aims to differentiate NAV from its competition.
Joe da Silva, director of product marketing at Extron, said: We knew we needed to be different from the chipsets that you can buy off the shelf in the market and our engineering team spent time developing our codec and our product. This is the reason we are a little late coming to market. But we feel we have something very different and something very special for the pro AV streaming market.
Can you have it all?
After ISE 2018, InAVate APAC took a long, hard look at the world of video streaming. The consensus from the industry was that there were three metrics for performance - namely bandwidth consumption, image quality and latency. The prevailing belief is that you can pick two metrics of performance while sacrificing the third. For example, you can have high image quality and low latency at the cost of high bandwidth consumption.
However, Extron with its NAV solution is aiming to provide it all and da Silva detailed: Competing products on the market are using codecs from other industries, such as JPEG2000 for example,and these have some limitations when it comes to pro AV. Extron took a ground up approach and we wanted to develop a codec (Pure3) that was designed for the pro AV industry. The competing solutions typically make you pick between one or two performance criteria for a codec from image quality, latency and bandwidth. Nobody is able to deliver all three and we saw that as a really great opportunity for us. Instead of having to pick one or two of those we can deliver all three of those criteria with our codec. What that means is that we can do visually lossless image quality, with ultra low latency at very efficient bit rates so you are no longer forced into one versus the other.
Intellectual property
Extron is aiming to fulfil its pro AV over IP ambitions with its patented Pure3 codec which is at the heart of the NAV's performance with regard to bandwidth consumption, image quality and latency.
Bandwidth consumption
Da Silva detailed: Where we are special and unique is that we a technology encoded into our codec called Intelligent Selective Streaming' and what this allows us to do is get the bitrates down to below what you would typically see on a JPEG2000 codec. Even if you don't adjust your bitrate down to a 1Gb threshold our 10Gb product is very rarely, if ever, using the full 10Gb of bandwidth.
Pure3 is also unique in how it approaches compression and transmission of video signals with a view to optimising bandwidth consumption.
Da Silva offered further details: Using the Intelligent Selective Streaming' feature of the Pure 3 codec we can evaluate the video signal and we are actually only sending the changes that have occurred. The process is similar to what you might come across in a H.264 video streaming solution where you have an I-frame, B-frame and P-frame to keep the bandwidth down. But the downside with these when it comes to H.264 is that you have to operate with a group of pictures, a scenario which adds to your latency in the order of frames.
With Pure 3 we have avoided that because we don't work on a frame basis, we are actually looking at very small granular portions of the video as it is coming in, so we actually start processing and evaluating the video before we even receive the entire frame of video. If there was no change between the footage frame and the subsequent frame then we don't need to send that data. This means we can significantly reduce our bandwidth consumption.
At Integrate 2018, Extron showcased the bandwidth consumption of NAV against its competitors in action. Da Silva summarises and presents a real world example of the NAV's performance: Take the Google homepage as an example which is for all effects and purposes a static image. Competing products are still going to use the full 1Gb pipe to transmit this data but with NAV, on the 1Gb products, this bandwidth consumption will drop down to maybe 10Mb out of the available 1Gb. Very little information needs to travel for a static image.
Image quality
Extron is not shying away from competing with respect to image quality and this is one of the reasons it is using the term pro AV over IP'.
Da Silva said: Because of how we are doing the compression with our codec the image quality that we can deliver at 1Gb is really remarkable. When we start looking at business class content, things like Excel and PowerPoint, things that have relatively low motion, even video playback in some cases, NAV can transmit that at bitrates of anywhere between half to one tenth of what our competitors are doing. Comparing this side by side with uncompressed video we can deliver anywhere from visually lossless to pixel perfect video with our codec which is pretty remarkable considering the performance levels other codecs available in the market.
Latency
With regards to latency, da Silva said: The bandwidth efficiency comes from how we are handling the video frames and what data we are transferring across the network.The other side of this is that we don't have to worry about the reordering of frames that means we can keep our latency down to the sub-fram
