Inaris Media Player
For modern streaming devices, a reliable and highly performant media player is essential for an outstanding user experience. With our Inaris Media Player, we offer a lean and flexible software component that supports a wide range of media sources for a high-quality TV experience. The player is tailored to fulfil the requirements of operators for OTT streaming as well as IPTV/DVB products. Our Inaris Media Player is perfectly suited and widely deployed on streaming and DVB/IP hybrid devices based on Linux, Android TV and also on RTOS-based systems. For best performance, we directly integrated our Inaris Media Player with the platform video and audio decoders.
Supported Platforms
Player Features
Common Media Player API
We provide a well-structured and easy-to-use Media Player API that unifies classic DVB/IPTV and OTT streaming playback. The API is available in C for Linux-based devices as well as in Java for Android TV platforms. Our goal is always to hide the player complexity and make it easy to use for the integrator on any platform.
Hybrid Player for TV Operators
Operators have specific requirements when they equip their devices with a media player. Very often, different delivery types need to be supported e.g., IPTV and OTT adaptive bitrate streaming. Our Inaris Media Player provides one single API to support all required playback types and allows to implement best in class hybrid operator-devices.
Playback Control
Our Inaris Media Player supports all standard control features like start/stop, pause/resume, seeking to a position and trick-modes (fast forward/backwards). Where available, position can be provided in absolute UTC positions (for timeshift or restart features) or as media relative positions (for VOD).
Audio/Video
The audio formats AAC, AC3, HE-AAC, EAC3 are supported. Audio can be part of a multiplex or provided as a separate stream. For video, AVC and HEVC are supported. Audio and video can be packed in Transport Stream or fragmented MP4 containers (fMP4).
Platforms
Our Inaris Media Player has already been ported to Broadcom (Linux and Android), HiSilicon and MStar platforms. Furthermore, it is available for any Android TV platform by using the MediaCodec API. Due to our hardware abstraction layer porting to other platforms is possible.
Sample Applications
For integration projects, we support well documented and easy to understand sample applications for Linux and Android TV. They can be used for test and verification as well as a blueprint for the product integration.
Adaptive Bitrate
Our Inaris Media Player supports adaptive bitrate streaming. For each downloaded media segment, the bandwidth is measured and the appropriate audio or video stream from the available bandwidth is selected.
High Performance
Our Inaris Media Player is completely implemented in C. The full performance of the underlying platform decoder is used. For example, on Broadcom platforms, the received media segments are directly passed to the Nexus drivers for the highest possible performance.
Low Latency
Our Inaris Media Player starts passing the media content to the decoder already when only a fraction of the first media segment has been received. This allows ultra-fast start-up of media playback and positioning/skipping.
Robustness
Our Inaris Media Player handles all typical IP connection problems in a robust way. If data cannot be downloaded due to interrupted IP connection, automatic retries are started until the connection is available again and media playback can continue.
Subtitles
We support WebVTT subtitles for OTT streaming by using our own WebVTT Subtitle Decoder. For DVB and IPTV playback Teletext and DVB subtitles are supported.
Teletext
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Encrypted Content
Our Inaris Media Player is integrated and certified with Verimatrix ViewRight OTT DRM (ViewRight Web Client) for ultra security. Other DRM systems can be integrated in a similar way using the decryption interface.
Seamless Ad Insertion
Personalized advertising is increasingly used for OTT streaming services. This advertising is inserted individually for the user on the server- or client-side. Our media player supports the seamless switching between content and personalized advertisement.
Player Metrics
We provide playback metrics to be used by third-party monitoring solutions such as Agama. Our monitoring API allows to request a wide range of metrics to be used by the integrator.
Monitoring & Analytics
Our Inaris Media Player generates detailed logs that are sent to our own monitoring and analytics cloud service based on Splunk. This allows analysis of the playback with state-of-the-art tools.
Logging
In case of a playback problems, the cause can be on client-side, the home network, the IP connection, but also on server-side. To find the cause of a problem can be difficult. Therefore, logs are of major importance for finding errors in the field. We collect and provide detailed logs using our monitoring system.
Software Architecture
Media playback is complex. Different types of media sources and AV codecs need to be handled. All kinds of media sources, like OTT streaming sources, DVB sources via tuner, and IPTV sources via IP multicast are supported by our Media Player. These different types of media sources can be registered with the Media Player as plugins. Our Inaris Media Player connects the registered media sources with the audio and video decoders provided by the platform. This clear separation between media source and decoders allows high flexibility in the supported playback scenarios. The architecture allows highly optimised and robust video playback using the full performance of the underlying decoder hardware in the most optimal way. For all the different constellations the Inaris Media Player provides a unified API to the user application.
Supported Media Sources
- HLS media source is used for HTTP live streaming.
- MPEG-DASH realises the playback of MPEG-DASH sources. The supported feature set is aligned with the ISOBMFF Live Profile.
- Tuner to receive transport streams via DVB-C/C2/T/T2/S/S2.
- Multicast RTPÂ media source is used when only basic support for RTP multicast streaming is needed.
- Nokia IPTV Client
- IPTV – VQE Client uses the Cisco (now Synamedia) VQE client. The VQE client supports multicast RTP streaming (IGMP V3), fast channel change (FCC), and forward error correction.
- RTSP/RTP media source supports the reception of unicast RTP streams with RTSP to control video playback.
- SAT>IP Client distributes the DVB transport stream from a remote tuner in the home network.
Our Services
TBD
DRM/CA System Support
We and our customers have integrated several CA systems:
Selected Success Stories
