What is IPTV?
What is IP? What is TV? Pixels, frames, colour, digital modulation, digital video broadcasting. SDTV, HDTV, 4K, 8K, IPTV architectures, Contribution, distribution, delivery, IPTV standards.
Hands on: Base IP connectivity, VLC.
IPTV protocol stacks
IP, TCP, UDP, RTP. IPv6. HTTP. Bandwidth requirements.
Hands on: IPTV packet analysis with Wireshark.
Video codecs
What is a CODEC, pictures and audio, digitisation, sampling, quantisation, encoding, compressing. MPEG, bit rates, resolution. I, B, P frames, GOP. MPEG 2, MPEG 4, H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1. Media players, containers.
Hands on: Analysing MPEG frames.
IP issues
Quality vs. bandwidth. Bandwidth, delay, latency, jitter, signalling. Routers. QoS, IP DSCP field, 802.1Q.
Hands on: Analysing jitter and other performance issues.
Timing
Synchronisation in one stream versus many streams. What is time? Computers and time. NTP, NTP accuracy, How NTP works, PTP, how PTP works, transparent and boundary clocks. PTP timestamps. Synchronising RTP timestamps. SDP.
Hands on: Analysing PTP with Wireshark.
UDP versus TCP
Where they are used in IPTV. Reliable, unreliable, connection oriented, connectionless. Broadcasts, multicasts and unicasts. TCP flow control, TCP and performance.
Hands on: Analysing TCP in OTT TV.
RTP
RTP, ports, mixers, translators, RTCP, SMPTE, FEC.
Hands on: RTP analysis with Wireshark.
SMPTE
Who are SMPTE, SMPTE standards, SMPTE 2022, 2110, MPEG2-TS, FEC, SDI over IP, 2110 essences. Where 2022 and 2110 are used.
Multicasting
Multicasting compared to unicasting and broadcasting, when to use and when not to use multicasting. Multicast addressing.
Hands on: Multicast troubleshooting tools,
Multicast architecture
The big picture, IGMPv1/v2/v3, PIM-SM, SSM. MLD. SAP/SDP.
Hands on: IGMP snooping, Building and analysing a routed multicast network.
Internet architecture and CDN
Content providers, Service providers, delivery networks, home networks. Peering and transit. Content Delivery Networks.
Hands on: Internet routing tables, using peeringdb.
OTT TV
OTT vs IPTV. OTT architecture. HTTP, HTTPS, QUIC. Adaptive streaming. HTML5. DASH vs HLS. RTSP, RTMP.
Hands on: Reading manifest files.
Security
Firewalls, TLS, QUIC, DRM, watermarking. Encryption. Geolocation. VPNs.
Hands on: QUIC streams and OTT TV.
Low latency live streaming
RIST, how RIST works, SRT, how SRT works. RIST vs SRT. Zixi. WebRTC.
Hands on: SRT protocol analysis.