[LAD] OPEN CONTROL ARCHITECTURE

[Frederick Gleason]

On Feb 27, 2015, at 18:04 06, Len Ovens <len at ovenwerks.net> wrote:

> Some background: I have been looking at AoIP and reading what I could. AES67 has the biggest complaint that it has poor service discovery (well none actually). I have been reading product manuals for various AoIP formats and what I have found is that some of the other ones do not have very good/any discovery either. I do not know if this is the protocols fault of the product but the setup for a Ravenna AoIP DAC/ADC box to a Ravenna PCIe card requires the user to know what the IP for both units are and then log in to both units via HTTP(s) to set them up in some sort of static configuration. This sounds no better than raw AES67.

I had a discussion about this with one of the high-level execs from LWRO at last year’s NAB show, and he pretty much admitted that service discovery had been intentionally left out of AES67 because the vendors couldn’t (wouldn’t?) agree on a uniform approach.  As for Ravenna, you’re quite right — service discovery is not covered anywhere in that spec either (beyond some very weak genuflections towards Zeroconf discovery).  It’s left as a vendor-defined detail.


> (Some other AoIP things might be better)

LiveWire is considerably better, where there is a full multicast-enabled discovery mechanism along with such niceties as network-transparent GPIO.  The problem, of course, is that none of that is openly documented at the protocol level (although Axia has been slowly moving in that direction over the past couple of years).


> So along the way I stumbled on OCA. This is not another OSC, though it could do that job too.

The problem I have with this is that it’s just too late in the AoIP game for it to make any real difference.  LiveWire and Ravenna are the two 800 pound gorillas in this space; any of the other AoIP systems are just niche players at this point (at least in the pro audio/broadcasting space).  Anything that doesn’t have the blessing of Axia or LWRO (preferably both) doesn’t stand a chance of getting any traction in the market.

Just my $0.02 US.

Cheers!


|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |              Chief Developer             |
|                           |              Paravel Systems             |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|  There are two ways of constructing a software design.  One is to    |
|  make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies; the     |
|  other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious        |
|  deficiencies.  The first method is far more difficult.              |
|                                         --C.A.R Hoare                |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|