Viz Engine Administrator Guide

Version 5.0 | Published December 20, 2022 ©

Working with NMOS

What is NMOS

The Networked Media Open Specifications provide an open and simple to use control-plane solution that enables interoperability and management of IP connected audio and video devices. They let you find, connect and configure media devices to enable video and audio on your IP network. NMOS is open, industry developed, free of charge and available to everyone. Initially, it was designed to support SMPTE ST 2110, with the possibility for other transport standards as well. NMOS is a fundamental part of the JT-NM technical recommendation, JT-NM TR-1001, enabling operational efficiency through automation and by reduction of manual overhead in setting up networked systems.

A Typical NMOS Environment

The central part in a typical NMOS setup is the Registration & Discovery Server. Every node, device, sender and receiver is registered there and can be discovered using NMOS IS-04. NMOS controllers/orchestrators can then be used to create NMOS IS-05 requests by use of SDPs to tell a receiver to subscribe to a certain sender's multicast address. The NMOS controller can also be used to assign multicast addresses to the senders, which allows centralized management of the multicast address/port assignment.

How to Configure NMOS on Viz Engine Systems

Settings Related to the Matrox Driver

By default, NMOS control is turned off. To enable it, a file which is part of the Matrox driver installation, needs to be edited. The file can be found in %PROGRAMFILES%\Matrox DSX-TopologyUtils\System64. Its name is the serial number of your Matrox board followed by the extension .json (for example, A654321.json).

The following value must be set to true as shown:

"enabled": true,

Additionally, the registration server must be configured in case DNS-SD is not enabled (example):

"fallback registration server": {
"api version": "auto",
"host name": "10.1.1.127",
"port": 50000
},

DNS service discovery can be enabled or disabled using that flag:

"use service discovery": true,

All other values are either not relevant for Viz Engine setups yet, or are set by Viz Engine when started for the first time.

Settings Related to Viz Engine

Certain settings in ipconfig.xml are related to NMOS, and can be edited directly in that file. If they are not changed, default values are being used. The following values are used for registering the node and device (examples):

<!--Name of the NMOS IS-04 node to be used.-->
<NmosNode>Vizrt Node on hostname</NmosNode>
<!--Name of the NMOS IS-04 device to be used.--> 
<NmosDevice>Vizrt Device on hostname</NmosDevice>

Every sender and receiver now uses two values to identify it at the registration server (examples):

<Label>IP Video Out 1</Label>
<Description>IP Video Out 1</Description>

json etc..