Emergency Unit of the Armed Forces

Videoma Broadcast Monitor installed in the Emergency Unit of the Armed Forces

CONTEXT

The Emergency Unit of the Armed Forces is a unit within the Spanish Armed Forces whose aim is to preserve the well-being of the people in cases of extreme danger, catastrophe or disaster. It has an enormous capacity to intervene in extreme situations. One of its last interventions was the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

The Unit needed a system that could record, file, document and search through audiovisual material coming from different media for its Joint Operations Center and the CIS Center (Comunications and Information System), at the UME’s Permanent Node Headquarters: digital terrestrial television, satellite, radio signals and signals generated from presentation devices or different format video recorders.

They needed a system based on a mixed signal digitization technology for analogical sources and demultiplexing technology for digital signals like DTT and satellite.

SOLUTION
Signal capture via demultiplexers
The Exterity systems’ demultiplexing technique is used for all digital signals coming from digital, terrestrial or satellite TV. These systems, called TV gateway, connect the signals gathered by the capture systems and extract the MPEG 2 Transport Stream digital video frames that correspond to each channel. Then it streams each one of these channels through the dependencies’ multipurpose data network, assigning a multicast IP address to each channel.

Coding capture
All signals produced in installations still in analogue have been adapted to digital to deliver them via IP to the same data network.

To do so, Exterity’s AV server coders were used, connecting the analogical video and audio outputs from the analogical video recorder and projection systems to this coder’s video and audio output which converted the signal to a MPEG 2 Transport Stream and sent it to a multicast IP address.

Recording
The recording subsystem is based on two MPEG 2 transport stream recording servers managed by Videoma Broadcast Monitor. These recording servers connect to the storage system via a Fibre Channel connection. Each recording server can record up to 20 channels and is based on Supermicro technology in simultaneous recording mode.

Storage
All MPEG 2 transport stream frames generated by the demultiplexers and the coders are recorded in the streaming recording server that then configures the filing and documentation system’s storage. This prevents very heavy file transportation traffic that could create chokepoints.

The storage system provided by Supermicro is based on RAID 5 technology and configured according to SATA disks in two cabins with fiber channel connections. They have a dual controller that interconnects via the fiber channel electronic data switching system to the video recording as well as filing and management servers.

This storage subsystem’s sizing is calculated to record 20 television channels 24x7 which means 3,360 hours of video. Twenty radio stations with 24x7 recording for 30 days means 6,720 hours of radio. It also records two hundred pieces of 100-minute long video or 334 hours of video including manual recording requests from the presentation room cameras and the registry of videoconference, voice communication and screen shot content for seven days. This could add up to 1,500 hours of video.

The storage system has a gross capacity of 12 TB, resulting in a usable capacity of 9.2 TB to store all these signals.

Plataforma de archivo, catalogación y vídeo bajo demandaVideoma Broadcast Monitor (VBM) representa el corazón del sistema. Está instalado en un sistema de servidores en cluster, conectados a su vez al sistema central de almacenamiento.

Mediante la administración y uso de la plataforma VBM, se gestiona todo el enrutamiento de canales sobre direcciones IP multicast, la planificación de la grabación de todas las señales de TV y radio existentes en la red multicast.

La visualización de los canales de televisión en directo se realiza mediante la vista en modo mosaico de varios canales de televisión y la monitorización de audio de uno de esos canales denominado canal activo. El administrador del sistema, define sus propios campos de documentación para después facilitar las búsquedas a los operadores de consola. Una de las grandes ventajas de VBM, es su arquitectura web, lo que permite visualizar el contenido desde cualquier puesto ubicado dentro de la red.

Platform for filing, cataloguing and video
on-demand

The platform for filing, cataloguing and video on-demand, Videoma Broadcast Monitor (VBM), is the core of the system. It is installed in a clustered server system, connected to a central storage system.

Through administration and use of the VBM platform, all channel routing through multicast IP addresses and recording planning for all TV and radio signals, in the multicast network, are managed.

TV channels are visualized live through the mosaic mode view of several television channels and audio monitoring of one of these channels, the active channel. The systems administrator defines his own documentation fields to then make searches easier for the console operators. One of VBM’s greatest advantages is its web architecture that allows viewing the content from any work desk in the network.