cibEngine

cib stands for Channel In a Box. This engine gives you a high level access to all matrox broadcast video cards with a simple TCP/IP interface. Mastering the feature rich Matrox DSX SDK requires a highly skilled developer with a good background in broadcast video. Instead of spending massive energy to master the SDK you can instead invest more time in the development of your application. We selected matrox because it's the world leader of high quality and high density broadcast video cards. Support for other video card like AJA is also supported for some channel types only. Marex decided to work with matrox because it offers much more than just an IO card.

 

cibEngine and vShare are very flexible products that make the OEM's life much easier and allow them to concentrate on their core products and leave us the details of low level field/frame based video processing, audio mixing and clip playback and recording. You get more than just an interface to the matrox cards you get an open architecture to build upon with features you could probably never justify the development time they require.

 

With cibEngine and vShare Marex is setting up a new open platform for broadcast applications to work together without having to know about each other. For instance, your CG application could benefit from a third party Telestrator product that would work on the same hardware system and often even at the same time each having its own graphics layer and able to get at the video inputs.

 

Contact Marex to get an evaluation of the product.

 

Clients:  
RetroTv   -  Baron Weather Services  - BitCentral - OnTrack Media Entertainment

 

Features:

 

  • The engine supports ingest (recording) and playout channels.
  • Support Instant Replay. Ingest on one channel and a Playout channel can load and play that clip while it continues to ingest.
  • Each channel is handled by one instance of the engine to better isolate channels.
  • Each channel can support a different video resolution as long as they are frame rate compatible with the master genlock of the video card. You can set channel 1 to NTSC and channel 2 to HD 1080i 29.97Hz as long as the master genlock is 29.97 or 59.94 for instance.
  • Supports multiple video cards.
  • Full VBI data is passed thought on the output when live is shown (E-E mode).
  • Closed Caption and timecode support.
  • Watchdog to pass input to output when PC is turned off if available on the matrox card.
  • vShare Aware! - vShare is the key to link your application with the engine for realtime audio and video IO without penalty. It's also the link to make matrox based applications from multiple vendors to interoperate with each other.
  • Monitor video inputs, outputs or even clips locally with our vShare ActiveX control or even monitor the source remotely using our low latency fastStream product. Ideal for web based application where standard streaming products have too much latency.
  • Stream directly with Flash Live Encoder or Microsoft Expression Encoder an input or the output with the vShare directShow device emulator filters. No software code to write!
  • Includes various DotNet, C++ and OpenGL sample applications with full source code that explain how to control the engine.

 

Ingest Features:

 

  • Capture video clips to various file formats: MPEG2, MXF, DVCPRO, XDCAM, QuickTime MOV.
  • Fixed recording duration or manual end of recording.
  • Auto recording with seamless splitting over multiple files either with a fixed duration per segment or a manual segment splitting.
  • VTR control that support the Sony protocol. One VTR per channel is supported.
  • Timecode recording for file types that support that option – current time of day, frame count, VTR timecode or RP-188 timecode.
  • Timecode burning on the recorded clip – current time of day, frame count, VTR timecode or RP-188 timecode.
  • When using the current time of day for timecode either the local or GMT time can be selected. An hour offset can also be applied for timezone support.
  • When using the frame count for timecode the start timecode can be set.
  • Recording of CEA-608 and CEA-708 Closed Caption to MPEG files and some other file format that supports it.
  • Volume control for up to 8 tracks depending on card features. (Could go up to 16 upon demand)
  • Support simultaneous proxy recording - a proxy is a smaller size video clip that can be used on the web or for faster browsing clips.
  • Proxy recording using various formats:
    • H264 and AAC within an MP4 file
    • H264 and AAC within a Smooth Streaming set of files
    • H264 and AAC directly pushed to an IIS publishing point for live streaming
    • VC1 within an WMV file
    • MPEG1 within an .mpg file
  • Smooth Streaming proxy can be encoded with one or multiple video streams depending on the available system resources and the selected H264 codec.
  • Proxy recording follows the recording of the full resolution media and thus supports splitting.
  • Timecode burning supported for proxy with its own independent settings.

 

Playout Features:

 

  • One clip engine that can run in various modes:
    • Single clip mode with cue/play control and seamless looping.
    • Playlist mode where many clips are put into a list for playback. Clips can be added and removed at any time. Seamless back to back playout and looping.
    • Timed based playlist where each clip has a start date and time. Automatic filling of gaps in the playlist with padding clips. Automatic playlist loading for fully automated playout - simply create playlists in a specific folder and it goes to air 24/7. One client has over 200 channels running 24h/7 for months now.
  • Clips can have a trim In and trim Out points.
  • Option to pause on first and/or last frame of a video clip.
  • Automatic up scaling from 1280 and 1440 to 1920 for HDV and DVCPRO type clips. Automatic up/down scaling of NTSC/PAL and 1080i clips. Support for 16x9 NTSC.
  • Frame rate conversion for 720p <=> 1080i and SD
  • Scrub/Shuttle control on the playing clip. Slow motion playback and vary speed from -10x to 10x.
  • One graphics overlay (TGA, PNG, JPG, BMP and AVI with alpha codec like HuffYUV) with in and out points in the clip. Multiple overlays are allowed as long as they don't overlap in time. Use a PRO channel for more graphics options.
  • Volume control for up to 8 tracks depending on card features. (Could go up to 16 upon demand)
  • The output channel can display a playing clip, a black signal or a live video pass through if the card has physical inputs.
  • A fallback source will kick in when the channel stops playing a clip. That source can be set to either black, live video input or a preset fallback video clip.
  • Supports Closed Caption and timecode (RP-188) output. Timecode can be either the timecode of the source video, the current time or a frame count..
  • Timecode burning with same options as for an Ingest channel.
  • Supports network file storage and fallback servers.

 

Playout PRO Features:

 

  • A Playtou PRO channel is multi layer Playout channel.
  • Combine up to 5 layers from various sources: Video inputs, 4 clips engines and 3 graphics layers.
  • The four clip engines have the same features as the one of a Playout channel.
  • Video clips support alpha channels when using a Matrox codec that supports alpha or if using the Quicktime animation file format.
  • Graphics layers support still images and are mainly available for external applications (the OEM apps) to feed graphics back to the engine from OpenGL rendering for instance. The format is 32 bits ARGB.
  • Each layer can be squeezed back in 2D then composited on the final output with a fade level applied. An OEM application may not use these features and instead get video from inputs and clips through vShare, push them to OpenGL textures, render a scene and readback the ARGB frame/field back to a graphics layer still using vShare.
  • Sound mixing of the five layers with volume control per track and per layer.
  • Up to 8 audio tracks depending on video card. (Could go up to 16 upon demand)
  • 3 vShare audio/video slots to monitor any of the channel media sources from within your OEM application or to stream out. Each slot has its own layout (size of video, audio vuMeters or not, deinterlaced or not, YUV or ARGB format)
  • Perfect to give your direct3D or OpenGL application quick and easy access to video sources (input or clips) and output your rendered graphics to SDI video.
    • Marex provides high speed (SSE2) deinterlacing with N tap vertical filters and also a temporal 3 frames filter.
    • Colorspace conversion is also SSE2 optimized to get YUV to ARGB conversion for OpenGL need.