[iptv-users] STB/video stream monitoring

[Alex Moen]

When I say "finger pointing", it's usually a battle between the  
middleware vendor, the stb vendor, the encoder vendor, and the  
(multiple) network vendors.  Obviously, not all at the same time,  
depends on the problem we're seeing.

It just gives you a no-nonsense determination of what the problem is,  
which will usually target the culprit.  Also, on really tough cases,  
Ineoquest will help analyze the data and gives you a well formatted  
report that shows and tells what the actual problem is.  Most of the  
vendors involved with IPTV trust Ineoquest (and the other vendors in  
this arena as well), so will really listen to you if you start sending  
them reports from this type of gear.

I haven't needed to use the gear to determine bad plant issues, our  
DSL plant equipment has enough counters in it to make the  
determination of whether the plant is the culprit.  I have had to use  
it in deeper problems, such as issues with CC data being incorrectly  
encoded or decoded, non-moving, constant anomolies in the video  
decode, VBR streams that were so variable that the flow changed from  
1.8 to 11 Mbps (blowing the STB buffer), etc.

Alex


On Jun 30, 2009, at 5:10 PM, Frank Bulk wrote:

> When you have this finger-pointing, what does the problem actually  
> end up
> being?  The vast majority of our video quality issues relate to the  
> copper
> plant.  Only a minority have been related our transport gear's  
> ability to
> drop the content off the DSL port.
>
> Frank
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alex Moen [mailto:alexm at ndtel.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 11:35 AM
> To: frnkblk at iname.com
> Cc: iptv-users at puck.nether.net
> Subject: Re: [iptv-users] STB/video stream monitoring
>
> Take a look at Ineoquest's iVMS (for transport quality monitoring) and
> iCMS (for video/audio content quality and end-user experience
> monitoring).  We use both of these products, and they can be both a
> lifesaver and a "finger-pointing" resolver.
>
> http://www.ineoquest.com
>
> Alex
>
>
> On Jun 30, 2009, at 11:02 AM, Frank Bulk wrote:
>
>> Is anyone doing any video stream error monitoring/checking from the
>> point-of-view of the STB?  I know that there is at least one vendor
>> out
>> there, Psytechnics, that has a module it can integrate into the
>> middleware
>> of the STB, but I haven't see IPTV middleware vendors picking that
>> up.  I
>> know that the Amino 110 writes out some rudimentary stats to the
>> drive.
>>
>> We track most of our video problems based on the 15-minute PM bins
>> that our
>> transport gear's ADSL ports record, but nothing L4 and up.
>>
>> Ideally every STB would have something Psytechnic-like built in.
>>
>> Frank
>>
>>
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>