Colin Perkins

UltraGrid 1.0 Release

Posted on 23 December 2011 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

UltraGrid - A High Definition Collaboratory

Posted on 05 September 2002 in category ultragrid

The goals of the NSF-funded UltraGrid project were to enhance the state of the art in high quality, large scale, telepresence systems and to enable flexible and ad-hoc remote collaboration.

The UltraGrid video conferencing system was the first to support high definition interactive video conferencing with low latency. Using its highest quality mode, UltraGrid supports uncompressed high definition video (720p/60) at approximately 1.2 Gbps; it also supports standard definition video formats and a range of compression algorithms. When used with the AccessGrid venue server infrastructure and audio service, UltraGrid forms a complete high definition video conferencing system.

UltraGrid is primarily intended as a platform for research into real-time network transport protocols and novel video coding algorithms. Key innovations include integration with custom IPsec acceleration hardware to provide secure interactive conferencing at gigabit rates, and the incorporation of TCP-Friendly Rate Control to adapt the video quality to variations in network capacity.

Publications and Standards Contributions

• Ladan Gharai, Tom Lehman, Alvaro Saurin and Colin Perkins, Experiences with High Definition Interactive Video Conferencing, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Toronto, Canada, July 2006. DOI:10.1109/ICME.2006.262565
• Colin Perkins and Ladan Gharai, RTP and the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Toronto, Canada, July 2006. DOI:10.1109/ICME.2006.262832
• Ladan Gharai and Colin Perkins, Holographic and 3D Teleconferencing and Visualization: Implications for Terabit Networked Applications, Proceedings of the IEEE Infocom 2006 High-Speed Networking Workshop: The Terabits Challenge, Barcelona, Spain, April, 2006. DOI:10.1109/INFOCOM.2006.29
• Colin Perkins, RTP Payload Format for Uncompressed Video: Additional Colour Sampling Modes, Internet Engineering Task Force, February 2006, RFC 4421.
• Ladan Gharai and Colin Perkins, RTP Payload Format for Uncompressed Video, Internet Engineering Task Force, September 2005, RFC 4175.
• Colin Perkins, Building Adaptive Applications: On The Need For Congestion Control, Invited paper presented at the 17th SPIE/IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging, San Jose, CA, USA, January 2005. DOI:10.1117/12.592797
• Ladan Gharai, Colin Perkins and Tom Lehman, Packet Reordering, High Speed Networks and Transport Protocol Performance, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN'04), Chicago, IL, USA, October 2004. DOI:10.1109/ICCCN.2004.1401591
• Colin Perkins and Ladan Gharai, Real-time Collaborative Environments and the Grid, Proceedings of the Workshop on Advanced Collaborative Environments (WACE'04), Nice, France, September 2004.
• Peter Bellows, Jaroslav Flidr, Ladan Gharai, Colin Perkins, Pawel Chodowiec and Kris Gaj, IPsec-Protected Transport of HDTV over IP, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications, Lisbon, Portugal, September 2003, LNCS 2778. DOI:10.1007/978-3-540-45234-8_84 Reprinted in P. Lysaght & W. Rosentiel, New Algorithms, Architectures and Applications for Reconfigurable Computing, Springer, 2005, ISBN 1-4020-3127-0. DOI:10.1007/1-4020-3128-9_15
• Ladan Gharai, Colin Perkins, Gary Goncher, and Allison Mankin, RTP Payload Format for Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) 292M Video, Internet Engineering Task Force, March 2003, RFC 3497.
• Ladan Gharai and Colin Perkins, Implementing Congestion Control in the Real World, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, Lausanne, Switzerland, August 2002. DOI:10.1109/ICME.2002.1035802
• Ladan Gharai, Colin Perkins and Allison Mankin, Large Group Teleconferencing: Techniques and Considerations, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Internet Computing, Las Vegas, NV, USA, June 2002.
• Colin Perkins, Ladan Gharai, Tom Lehman and Allison Mankin, Experiments with Delivery of HDTV over IP Networks, Proceedings of the 12th International Packet Video Workshop, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, April 2002.

Related Publications

• Petr Holub, Ludek Matyska, Milos Liska, Lukas Hejtmanek, Jiri Denemark, Tomas Rebok, Ravi Paruchuri, Jan Radil and Eva Hladka, High-definition multimedia for multiparty low-latency interactive communication, Future Generation Computer Systems, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Elsevier Science, The Nederlands. ISSN 0167-739X, 2006, vol. 22, no. 8, pp. 856-861.
• Andrei Hutanu, Gabrielle Allen, Stephen D. Beck, Petr Holub, Hartmut Kaiser, Archit Kulshrestha, Milos Liska, Jon MacLaren, Ludek Matyska, Ravi Paruchuri, Steffen Prohaska, Ed Seidel, Brygg Ullmer and Shalini Venkataraman, Distributed and collaborative visualization of large data sets using high-speed networks, Future Generation Computer Systems, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Elsevier Science, The Nederlands. ISSN 0167-739X, 2006, vol. 22, no. 8, pp. 1004-1010.

Talks and Demonstrations

• Photographs from a Demonstration at the SuperComputing 2005 conference in Seattle, November 2005.
• Ladan Gharai, “Putting the “Ultra” in UltraGrid: Full rate Uncompressed HDTV Video Conferencing”, Presentation to the 20th Asia-Pacific Advanced Network meeting, Taipei, Taiwan, August 2005.
• Ladan Gharai, “Full rate Uncompressed HDTV Transport: Experiences and Implementation”, Presentation to the 19th Asia-Pacific Advanced Network meeting, Bangkok, Thailand, February 2005.
• Demonstration at the SuperComputing 2004 conference in Pittsburgh, November 2004.
• Ladan Gharai, “Uncompressed HD Video Streaming with Congestion Control”, Presentation to the 18th Asia-Pacific Advanced Network meeting, Cairns, Australia, July 2004.
• Colin Perkins, “Congestion Control for High Performance Networked Multimedia”, Seminar at the Hamilton Institute, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland, January 2004.
• Presentation and demonstration for PBS, ISI East, November 2002.
• Demonstration at the SuperComputing 2002 conference in Baltimore, November 2002.

Technology Transfer

UltraGrid's technology had been adopted by other HDTV enthusiasts. This includes the CESNET group at the Masaryk University in Brno and the HDTV group at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

The CESNET group recently demonstrated HD Multipoint Conferencing with UltraGrid at iGrid 2005. In this demonstration, low latency high-definition video and audio were used to create a "near to immersive" environment across continents over optical networks. For more information see here.

Software Download

Source code for the UltraGrid system is available for download under a BSD-style license, and should run on recent Linux, FreeBSD and MacOS X systems with supported video capture and display hardware, and appropriate network connection.

Description	Release Date	Source Code
UltraGrid v0.1.1 (SC2002 demonstration)	28-Nov-2002	uv-0.1.1.tar.gz
UltraGrid v0.2.1	10-May-2004	uv-0.2.1.tar.gz
UltraGrid v0.3.1	26-Oct-2004	uv-0.3.1.tar.gz
UltraGrid v0.4.3	23-Aug-2005	uv-0.4.3.tar.gz
UltraGrid v0.5.1	16-Feb-2007	uv-0.5.1.tar.gz

UltraGrid is primarily an HDTV video conferencing system, although starting with v0.4 we also support DV video. To use the HDTV conferencing features of UltraGrid, you need an HDTV camera with SMPTE-292M output (we use a Philips LDK-6000), an HDTV video capture card (DVS HDstationOEM or Centaurus), an HDTV capable display, and high performance hosts to act as sender and receiver connected by a network supporting at least one gigabit per second sustained transfer rates (1.5Gbps preferred). To sustain video capture and network transmission at HDTV rates sender and receiver hosts should have a dual 64 bit/66 MHz PCI bus architecture (or better) with gigabit or ten gigabit Ethernet. Performance is very sensitive to details of the motherboard and PCI configuration; please ask on our mailing list for advice.

Starting with version v0.4, UltraGrid also supports DV cameras attached via FireWire connections, as a lower quality alternative. There are no special system requirements for DV conferencing, other than a consumer DV camcorder connected by FireWire.

Contacts and Mailing List

The UltraGrid project is a collaboration between the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California (Dr Ladan Gharai) and the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow (Dr Colin Perkins and Alvaro Saurin).

The UltraGrid users mailing list exists as a forum for discussion of the UltraGrid system. This is a public mailing list, and anyone with an interest is encouraged to subscribe.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 0230738. The UltraGrid software is based on earlier work funded by DARPA IPTO under contract #MDA972-99-C-0022. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or the United States Government.

This product includes software developed by the Computer Science Department at University College London, by the Computer Systems Engineering Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and by Akimichi Ogawa. This product uses the RSA Data Security, Inc. MD5 Message Digest Algorithm.