Research : UltraGrid

UltraGrid 1.0 Release

Posted on in category ultragrid

I'm pleased to pass on the following announcement of a new UltraGrid release, derived from our original code, made by the Laboratory of Advanced Networking Technologies (ANTLab) at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. 

From:    Petr Holub 
Subject: UltraGrid 1.0 Release
Date:    23 December 2011 16:26:34 GMT

Dear colleagues and partners,

it is my pleasure to annouce the promised December release of our low-latency
high-quality HD-to-4K video over IP transmission system:

                          UltraGrid 1.0

Compared to the previous version 0.9, which targeted integration of
various existing features, for this release (aka Boxing-Day-Release :) ) we
have focused on extending UltraGrid with the features most often requested by
the community (most of you will probably enjoy GUI, real-time JPEG compression
up to 4K and stereo-HD transmissions).

List of major new features:
- Native SuperHD/4K video support with AJA Kona3 (SuperHD and 4K for MacOS X
 only) and BlackMagic Decklink Quad (SuperHD for Linux and MacOS X)
 - tested with NTT JPEG2000 codec and Astro 4K monitor
 - and yes, we're still waiting for Decklink 4K card....
- Stereoscopic HD/2K
 - supported hardware: any quad card (Decklink Quad, Linsys Quad/i), Decklink
   Extreme 3D or just a pair of cheap IntensityPro HDMI capture cards!
 - software display: side-by-side (for majority of users, with a screen
   extended to both outputs of a graphics card) or line-interleaved display
   (e.g., for Planar displays, demonstrated at SuperComputing'11)
 - display through HDMI 1.4 using Decklink Extreme 3D (various HDMI modes
   for commodity and semi-pro displays)
- NVidia CUDA-based JPEG compression, up to 4K resolution in real-time
 working both on Linux and MacOS X
 - cca 50-300 Mbps for HD, quality is specified by the user
 - this is the 4K real-time JPEG compression that was demonstrated during
   CineGrid workshop for those of you who attended :)
 - 4K calls for high-performance cards like NVidia GXT580, which is still
   fairly affordable
- Support for DeltaCast capture/playback cards, that also allow to stream
 complete raw HD-SDI signal.
- DXT decompression using any display device
 - previous release was limited to GL-rendering of DXT
- Simple GUI that allows to stop/start UltraGrid sender/receiver, as well
 as configure it and store the settings persistently.
- Native audio for both Linux (ALSA) and MacOS X (CoreAudio).
- New flexible RTP-based packet format for high-bandwidth streams (both
 compressed and uncompressed HD/2K/4K video or even higher; slightly
 outdated version has been published as CESNET technical report 24/2010,
 up-to-date version is available in UltraGrid wiki - we would like to push
 this as a standard in a future).
- Support for user-settable double and triple buffering for GL and SDL.
- Forward error correction based on interleaved multiplication or XOR-based
 parity.
- Bug fixes of problems reported by our users.
- Updated docs.

Software is available for download from Download section of the UltraGrid
wiki: http://ultragrid.sitola.cz.

As of now, the release is published as a source code. Binary packages
will follow during January 2012.

The next major release should be in Spring/Summer 2012 and the major goal
is to enhance the point to multi-point and multi-point to multi-point
features.

On behalf of the whole team, we wish you merry Christmas and best wishes
for 2012!

Petr

================================================================
                          Petr Holub
CESNET z.s.p.o.                                         CERIT-SC
Zikova 4                             Institute of Compt. Science
162 00 Praha 6, CZ                            Masaryk University
Czech Republic                     Botanicka 68a, 60200 Brno, CZ 
e-mail: Petr.Holub@cesnet.cz               phone: +420-549493944
                                            fax: +420-541212747
                                      e-mail: hopet@ics.muni.cz