[LAD] More thoughts on AES67

[Reuben Martin]

On Saturday, October 04, 2014 03:37:10 PM Len Ovens wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Oct 2014, Len Ovens wrote:
> > I have also seen this thought from every manufacture or AoIP protocol
> > vendor:
> > 
> > We welcome an open standard and want to support it. Interoperability is
> > good for us. (my paraphrase)
> > 
> > I would suggest that no-one wants to be the maker whos stuff works with
> > other
> It could also be that makers would like to offer the in house networking
> variety as well as the one universal one instead of offering 5 or 6
> different IF cards as some do now.
> 

You have to remember that many of these vendors have carved out their own 
little fiefdoms within AoIP. Many of them have a primary focus: live audio, 
broadcast, distributed PA, telephony/VOIP etc. The only real way to integrate 
them in large facilities without  a common format is to have analog endpoints 
that patch the separate types of systems together. That saves money, so when 
contractors are putting together bids, and there are vendors that support a 
cheap way to integrate layer 3 protocols, they will get advantage over the 
ones that don't.

The AES67 looks to provide gateway nodes for the various systems. It has some 
inherent limitations, but for for the scope of Linux Audio I think it will be 
sufficient for what most people would want to do with it.

> I would suggest that no-one wants to be the maker whos stuff works with
> other products, but requires extra attention to get set up. This means
> extra support which costs money. The aes67 document does suggest some of
> the discovery types available:
> 
> Bonjour
> SAP
> Axia Discovery Protocol
> Wheatstone WheatnetIP Discovery Protocol
> 
> Of these 4 SAP seems to be the one not attached to someone. (it is quite
> old as these things go) But all of them seem to be at least somewhat open.
> That is, I suspect that these were the choices put up but there was no
> agreement. It would not be hard to support all four, but I suspect one of
> them will just get used and become standard. Any forum messages I have
> read just suggest the dev use SAP as happens.

Bonjour is just the apple branding of zeroconf. It's not really attached to 
apple. I think it would offer the most robust solution. In my experience SAP is 
very slow to propagate. There's also SLP which almost nobody uses anymore. As 
well as UPnP / SSDP, which I hate, but would integrate well with HTML based 
control messaging.

-Reuben