Q2 2020 news: SRT PASSet, RIST, DRM and Larix Broadcaster on Drafts

Softvelum team kept working during this intense Q2 of 2020 and we have several important updates for our products.

Nimble Streamer

First we'd like to address a Nimble Streamer issue which appeared back in May. Our external dependency package - libjson - introduced a fatal issue which caused multiple malfunctions across the entire Ubuntu users community. Within a few hours we detected a problem and released a fix which allowed us to overcome any consequences. We sent proper announcement to our Linux users so our clients got proper assistance on time, so most of them were not affected by this. 

That's just one of the advantages of being our subscribed customer.

Now let's see some new features.

Nimble Streamer SRT Publisher Assistance Security Set (SRT PASSet) is our new security and management framework for SRT. These are major capabilities:

• Process incoming streamid.
• Make per-server, per-application and per-stream authentication with user and password.
• Apply any SRT parameters to every individual publisher and each individual stream.
• Apply allow and deny lists for IP addresses on server and stream level.
• Manage published streams via the publish control framework.

This provides our customers with great flexibility for publication control, especially for handling mobile publishers. Read these articles for more details:

• SRT Publisher Assistance Security Set overview
• Setting SRT user and password authentication
• Setting per-stream authentication and parameters

Speaking of SRT, we've also added Forward Errors Correction support as part of our freeware feature set. FEC filter is still under development by the SRT community and we've added it per requests from our customers, so please use FEC filter feature at your own risk.

Nimble DRM has finally become available this quarter. It covers these features:

• Google Widevine™ support to protect MPEG-DASH.
• Microsoft Playready™ support to protect MPEG-DASH.
• Apple FairPlay™ support to protect HLS.
• Widevine Cloud Service support with key rotation.
• EZDRM’s DRM-as-a-Service support for Widevine, FairPlay and Playready.
• Verimatrix™ VCAS key management support to protect HLS with AES.

DRM is a premium feature set of Nimble Streamer.

Both SRT PASSet and Nimble DRM are part of Nimble Addenda - a premium package which also covers Nimble Advertizer. Package license costs just 50 USD per month per server and gives extended feature set with proper support.

RIST protocol support. A new protocol has been introduced by RIST Forum. RIST provides an open, interoperable and technically robust solution for low-latency live video over unmanaged networks.

Read this setup article to try it in action.

Last but not least, we've released an article on Handling fuzzy FPS to get proper bitrate output with some sources that produce streams with uncertain frame rate, like mobile encoders.

Larix Broadcaster

Our mobile team made a number of updates.

Larix Broadcaster app was mentioned in a few articles on SVG News:

• NFL Draft 2020: NFL Media Deploys iPhone Production Kits, Coordinates 600+ Live Feeds To Bring Virtual Draft to Fans - exciting overview of the virtual draft infrastructure.
• NFL Draft Reflections: For Epic Transmission Plan, SRT Protocol Came Up Clutch - gives some details, including SRT usage.
• MLB Draft 2020: MLB Network Embraces Virtual Event With 120 In-Home Feeds, Socially Distant Facility - another great use case of virtual production.

Softvelum team was very proud to see Larix Broadcaster in such awesome use cases.

Now, let's look at new features.

We've released Larix Grove - an easy to use format which allows distributing streaming setup details. You use our web wizard to create a URL and a QR code to send to your publishers. It's supported in Larix for Android and iOS.

Larix Broadcaster for iOS is now able to provide Dual/Triple camera system support on iPhone 11+, including wide-angle and telephoto camera.

We also have multiple cameras streaming (via picture-in-picture and side-by-side) on modern supported devices in our beta version. You can use this link to install TestFlight and try it in action.

Larix for Android now has USB OTG camera support if the hardware vendors give that capability.

You can also go to Google Play and Join Beta to get early access to new features like multiple physical cameras on Android 10+.

Our YouTube channel also has a number of new videos explaining some of Larix features and other company updates

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