How to Elevate the Quality of Your Video Stream With AJA HELO Plus
Steve Nathans-Kelly: Paul Turner, Product Manager at AJA Video Systems is here, and we're going to have a chat about elevating the quality of your video stream with the AJA HELO Plus. It's an advanced H.264 streaming recording device that supports dual-channel encoding to simultaneous streams and recording the local storage devices Let's start off with some basics. The HELO Plus is a standalone appliance. What are the advantages of using a standalone appliance for producing streams versus a computer and a capture card?
Paul Turner: One thing that you get with a hardware appliance like this is the ease of setup. You don't have to worry about having a laptop or a computer and a screen. You don't necessarily have to have a particularly technically savvy operator. The unit itself has a pair of buttons on the front, one conveniently labeled Record, one conveniently labeled Stream. So in some of our markets, the operators are not particularly skilled and so not to have to have a web UI and a laptop there is an advantage. You can just press the buttons and the machine will do what you tell it to do. You can even lock the buttons, for what it's worth, so that you press Record and it will stream and record at the same time. So ease of setup is pretty simple. Again, we've got video and audio and we have an Ethernet connection on the back.
And for a lot of cases, that's it. You bring your video in, you take your stream out, and if you've already set up your credentials with your CDN, YouTube, Facebook, whatever, you can just press the button and away you go. So that's a pretty significant one.
Again, ease of use is an important thing, but not all customers want to have a simplistic UI like that. So of course we do offer the opportunity to control the device in a more sophisticated manner if you connect it to a laptop or a computer. Now, to be very clear, the laptop and the computer are not doing any of the streaming. They're just there to go in and control the machine. We lock out most of the features when you are actually streaming to make sure that you don't do something that would blow up your stream.
But in terms of setting up the machine initially, that's a pretty important point. Anything that you would want to set up on the stream, you can do over the web UI. Anything you would want to do operationally, you can do by pressing the buttons on the front of the machine. Or indeed, we've actually launched a Stream Deck control capability recently. The Stream Deck is a little push-button control panel, and you can basically run a live stream directly from the machine through the Stream Deck integration. One other thing that you get when you've got an appliance is that you don't ever have to worry about a new update coming in and then you have to spend a little while reconfiguring your I/O so that your streams will once again performance at level that you expect them to.
Another thing I should mention about the box: There are no fans on the machine at all. It's totally, passively cool. So there's no noise to worry about should you be operating it from a presenter's desk.
Steve Nathans-Kelly: So, two-button operation is an option, but you can do everything from configuring the device, to configuring your stream, picking the streaming destination, PiP, titling, and so forth in the web interface.
Paul Turner: The machine is very powerful on the production front. It'll allow you to do picture-and-picture on its two inputs. There's an SDI input and an HDMI input. So you could use a PTZ camera and an SDI camera or a computer with a PowerPoint presentation, for example. And both of those inputs have their own picture-and-picture processor. So you can get dual streaming of those inputs. Setting those up is something you'd do before the show, and you've got a nice graphical web interface to figure out where you're going to put the images. But to actually run the machine itself, you just hit it from the front panel.
Target Market
Steve Nathans-Kelly: Who would you say is the target market for the HELO Plus?
Paul Turner: It is very hard to pigeonhole streaming into verticals because streaming is everywhere. Realistically, we have these machines in use across the world in all sorts of applications. Originally, we expected to put the HELO Plus in houses of worship, education, and some government work. hat's where the whole idea of the front panel control came in. You look at something like a house of worship or an educational facility, and in the case of a house of worship, the operator a volunteer. They come in for the day of the presentation to so and whatever, and they know nothing about video, but they can go ahead and press the Stream button or the Record button and have a machine perform its functions without any background knowledge whatsoever. Same for education. There are a lot of cases where that operator will be a student, and again, you just want somebody to come in and press the buttons and make the thing work.
It's expanded quite dramatically into sporting applications. We have a lot of instances where they benefit from some of the features of the product like playing in multi-language. The medical field was somewhere, if I'm being honest, that I never expected this machine to go, but we have a number of teaching hospitals that use a HELO Plus to stream from the operating room to the lecture hall so people can participate in the procedure and learn first-hand what's going on. So it's pretty much across the board. We have college sports, we have government work, we have education and house of worship, even broadcast in some cases, and production onsite because again, it's silent, so you don't have to worry about having it at your location. You may want to stream what you're producing over to a director who may not be co-located with the actual production at the time.
Switching Between Layouts
Steve Nathans-Kelly: I think I saw an article about the HELO Plus being used more in eSports too. Is that right?
Paul Turner: Again, the beauty of it is the machine has this HDMI input--and by the way, you don't have to worry about things like timing, which is usually a problem when we interact with SDI and other sources. You want to have the same frame rate, and then there's only so much we can do with a frame rate difference. But you don't ever have to lock any of the inputs, the frame syncs on each input as long as you've got a stable frame. In a lot of cases the HDMI input's frame rate is not so important, because even though the computer may not be producing exactly 59.94 or 29.97, most often that HDMI source is being used for PowerPoint presentation, so they're still images. But we do take care of all of the technical details of gen-locking for you.
In things like eSports, where some material may be coming from a PTZ camera that's looking at the arena, or in the house of worship market where you may have a wide shot camera and a closeup of the lyrics to hymn or parts of the sermon, all of that is pre-processed in the machine at the same time.
And we have these things called Layouts, which are easy to explain, and ties into what we were saying earlier about titling. A Layout is a combination of a color background that's generated in the machine, an SDI source--anything up to 1080P 60--the HDMI source, and the graphics layer. And we layer all of those using a priority-layering engine in the machine.
One of the unique things about our system is that you are not forced to only having the PowerPoint in the upper-ight-hand corner or the upper-left-hand corner. You can position them any way you want them to be. It's very common now, as streaming has become more sophisticated, to have two images at the same time and a graphic at the bottom. And the beauty of the machine is it will allow you to switch between them. You have 10 layouts to use live. And so you can switch between those things in real time in the streaming box. It's not a production switch, and we don't ever claim it to be such. But for a lot of house of worship and educational facilities, we've just upped the game in terms of the production value that they can get and production value equals eyeballs.
Steve Nathans-Kelly: Can you switch between layouts on the box?
Paul Turner: You do that with the Stream Deck. There's not enough real estate on the front of the machine for you to actually be able to get in there. Or you can do it over the web interface from a laptop or a desktop. And again, to be very clear, the UI from this is a web interface. You don't need an application on the desktop. We have people using tablets to control this machine. The UI is actually served up from an internal web server that's in the machine, which means you can have multiple people in control of the machine at the same time should you want to. You might have a director who wants override capability for choosing a particular shot, but you absolutely can use the Stream Deck to switch between the layouts. And I show that all the time at trade shows. So you can get a simple 15-button Stream Deck, which is what I actually have here at my desk.
There's a 32-button Stream Deck that allows you to get to some other functions. But the Stream Deck becomes a shotbox and there, kind of tiering the control from very simple, "just press the go button and away we go." all the way up to anything you might want to do with the box you can do through the web UI. And in an intermediate way, you get to control the things that you would want to change while you are physically on air. We don't let you do things that would potentially damage the stream because again, a lot of our operators are not necessarily experts in streaming or SDI or HDMI timing and the like. Things that would cause you a problem--like arbitrarily switching the frame rate of the machine while you're in the middle of a stream--that would be a bad thing. Won't let you do that while the machine is actually streaming. You can do it beforehand, but when you tell it's on air, then it locks those sort of gotcha features out of the operation.
Dual Encoding, Recording, and Streaming
Steve Nathans-Kelly: The HELO Plus is a dual-encoder device with recording capability. So when you're configuring it beforehand, can you configure one bitrate for streaming and then a higher bitrate for a local recording?
Paul Turner: Right. The other thing about the machine is it's not just a streamer. There are two I/O connectors--one is an SD card and one is a USB stick--and the machine will record whatever's going through it at the time of streaming onto the SD card, onto the USB stick, or in real time over the network to an SMB share. And you get to choose two of those three--one as your main, one as your backup.
The bitrates for the recording and the streaming can be completely different. For a lot of recordings, you've going to want to have a pretty high quality recording because it's an archive of your presentation. You may do 20 Megabits per second of H.264 onto the recording media. There's not too many CDNs who are going to like you sending them 20 Megabits per second for streaming. And so what's most common is for people to set up the streaming profile for 5 Megabits per second while the recording profile is set up for 20 Megabits per second, for example.
Enhancing Production Value
Steve Nathans-Kelly: Are any unique problems that producers and users have that the HELO Plus solves that other devices out there don't?
Paul Turner: Sure. We've mentioned a couple of'em we've gone through. First of all is the reliability of the box. You plug it in, you turn it on, and you are good to go. It's an AJA product. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure that this machine is as bulletproof as you can make it. The reality is, you can't make any product absolutely bulletproof. You don't control the network connectivity, that sort of thing. But in terms of the hardware platform, it's a very, very robust platform.
Obviously, for production value, we've mentioned the ability to do picture-and-picture on both sources at the same time. So we've got the customers who do side by side or two simultaneous videos with a lower-third. It's very common in the case of education. They'll have a lecture full size and the slides are somewhat reduced, and you can get your lecture notes down at the bottom of the screen. Or maybe at some point in a presentation it's more important to see the PowerPoint or the PTZ, whatever that source might be, so you'll have that full screen with the presenter being small.
So there's a lot of production value that you can get here. And I shouldn't minimize the ability of the machine to record and optionally play back that recording.
Play to Stream
Paul Turner: We added a feature at the end of last year, which we call Play to Stream. And what Play to Stream does is it takes whatever recording you've made with the HELO Plus and it will allow you to use that recording as the source to the playout. That gives you immense flexibility. Imagine you're an educational facility and you've got one major lecture hall that you do most of your streaming from. So let's say at 10 o'clock in the morning, that lecture hall is being used for an economics lecture, and you know that as part of your value add, you want to stream that out to the outside world at the time of the lecture. But it would also be useful at maybe 2 o'clock to go ahead and restream it, send it out again as a stream for those people who couldn't attend at the original time. Play to Stream will allow you to do that. You record exactly what you streamed at the 10 o'clock lecture and you replay that recorded stream out at 2 o'clock.
Again, the bit rate will be automatically adjusted for you so that your stream something that the CDN doesn't dislike. The really cool thing here though is, what are you going to do with that lecture hall when the machine is actually streaming out? Well, the machine will actually recall, replay the Play to Stream and record at the same time. So now the lecture hall itself could be being used at 2 o'clock for a lecture in organic chemistry that can be streamed out by the box while it's simultaneously streaming out the previously recorded economics lecture. And it has no problem with doing the record and the stream at the same time.
There's another choice that you could do for any combination of recorded or streamed media, the need to be able to edit your stream. It's very common in a house of worship situation. At some point in time you'll want to edit down that original stream and make it available in some of the parish hall rooms for the Sunday school kids to come in and watch, for example. So you can actually go ahead and easily edit the material that you've recorded. It's very flexible on that front.
Second Stereo Pair
Paul Turner: Now the other thing that we've done recently is we added a second stereo pair to the audio. So the base unit has stereo audio in, either coming off of the SDI input or the HDMI input, or there's even a stereo and analog input on the back. And you just choose which source you want to have as the audio input. Based on feedback from sports. We actually added a second stereo audio pair as an option to the box because not everybody wants it. And that's for things like home and away at a hockey game. It's highly likely that at a hockey game, you're likely to have an English home and away commentary, but also a French home and away commentary because the Canadians are mad for hockey.
Same with soccer. You might have an English home and away presentation, audio presentation to go on the video on one service, and a Spanish home and away. Not only is it two inputs, but it will actually simultaneously stream to two different at the same time. So it's entirely possible for you to have an English service, which is the video plus English home and away, and a separate video service with a French home and away or Spanish home and away on there. And they can go to two different CDNs through two different interfaces profiles, maybe SRT to one, maybe RTMP to the other machine will happily do that.
Steve Nathans-Kelly: So you're streaming in two different languages, two different audio streams simultaneously.
Paul Turner: Now that's an option to have the second audio channel. So not everybody wants it. And I didn't want to burden the price of the machine with four channel audio, two stereo pairs for people who didn't need it. That's also true, by the way, for the Play to Stream, because not everybody wants or needs to be able to play back a previously recorded thing. So both of those are options.
The machine will actually allow you to test them out. You don't have to buy them right off the bat. There's an option in the machine, in the web UI. You say, "I'd like to trial that Play to Stream please." And we give you 15 days to just try it. If it works for you, great, you can go ahead and buy a license on the machine and it will set it up. And if you don't, no harm, no foul; at the end of 15 days, that feature goes away and you carry on as you were. No watermarking on this because I don't believe on a streaming device you want to not see what that looks like once you've sent it through a CDN clean. So if you turn on the option for Play to Stream or the four-channel audio, you get it fully functional for your 15 days.
SRT Support
Steve Nathans-Kelly: One thing we did talk about before we got started was SRT support. Can you just talk a little bit about that, how that's integrated into the device and how people are using it?
Paul Turner: Sure. SRT, for those of you who are not familiar with it, it stands for Secure Reliable Transport. It's another streaming protocol. The purpose behind it was to allow you to take it over a non-secure, non-managed network. So within a facility, you own the network, hopefully you've got a firewalled, so people can't come in and get you unless you're physically streaming out, in which case you put a tunnel through that firewall for the outgoing video. But if you try and send that material over the general internet, you have a couple of problems. The first one is that the internet is not secure. So you are going to want to encrypt this material. The other problem that you have with the general internet is that it's not reliable. You have no control over the switches that the video will go through. None.
A huge number of network switches, when they get really busy, will simply throw packets away. And that doesn't cause a problem for people who are interacting with a website like Amazon and you're trying to take a look at a new pressure cooker--it doesn't matter because what will happen is the browser will eventually say, "Well, I haven't had a response, I'll ask for it again."
We don't have that in video. We have to put out one frame in one frame's time. And so that causes all sorts of problems.
SRT is an open source solution, but it covers both the need for reliability and the need for security by encrypting the video and also allowing for an out-of-band packet of regeneration or retransmission path. HELO Plus has SRT built in as standard.
There's three modes to SRT. One is called Caller, one is called Listener, and one is called Rendezvous. We support Caller and Listener. The only difference between the two is whether or not, when you press Go on the HELO Plus, does it start to stream? That's Caller mode. In Listener mode, the server at the other end says, "Please start to stream," and then it does the stream. We cover both of those in the box as standard as part of the product's functionality. We added the Listener mode at the end of last year and our first showing of Listener mode was at NAB, but that's standard in the product.
So RTMP, RTSP, HLS, and SRT are all standard in the products as your choice of whatever protocol you want on any one of your particular outputs.
Steve Nathans-Kelly: Great. And just one point of clarification about the dual-channel encoder. It's one stream and one recording, or two live streams, right?
Paul Turner: It's two channels, and those two channels get combined at the very front of the machine and they then go through the encoding and streaming process. There are two separate encoders, though, and there are up to two stream outputs. It's very powerful. It has two separate outputs. One of them could be HLS, the other one might be RTMP. They get the same signal--that's that pre-combined signal of the two inputs. So there's one Program going through the box. It can go out two separate outputs, one as HLS, one as RTSP, for example. It's also then available to go down to the recorder. The recorder uses one of the encoding streamers.
Two channels of video in are combined with the graphic, and they're then sent to two separate encoders. Those two encoders can be used for two separate output streams, and you can choose either one of them to go down to the recording. So you can actually have two output streams and a recording happening at the same time. It's just that the recording will be using the same settings as one of the encoders for the output stream. It doesn't matter which one, and there's no main and backup. They're both encoders. You choose whichever encoder fits your needs for the recording.
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