HOME Multiviewer

This low-latency Multiviewer application is part of the first batch of agile HOME Apps that no longer require dedicated, bespoke hardware, ­relying instead on cloud-native microservice technology such as Docker.

HOME Multiviewer is perfectly suited for high-bandwidth/low-latency ST2110 broadcast environments, SRT stream workflows in the cloud, NDI devices, compressed formats, and so on. The number of PiPs can easily be adapted to the job at hand. Going from one to up to 32 splits in a real-world scenario (more splits are possible) is a simple matter of setting the relevant ­parameter in HOME which, among many other things, acts as the GUI for all HOME Apps.

Multiviewer layouts for up to 64 PiPs—complete with customizable tallies, alarms, clocks, level meters, OSDs, UMDs, and metadata—are created with Lawo’s intuitive theWALL app, which sits inside the HOME cluster.

All settings can be stored as user presets and applied to other HOME Multiviewer instances for a unified look.

Most importantly, users don’t need to be engineers—nor have a scripting background—to spin up and configure a HOME Multiviewer. The HOME management platform makes this plain, simple, and intuitive.

There are two reasons for Lawo’s standard-server approach. The first is the desire to offer long-term support for all present and future streaming and compression formats, for 360° flexibility.

The HOME Multiviewer app currently natively supports SMPTE ST2110, NDI and SRT—with or without JPEG XS, H.265 or H.264 compression. Future format requirements can be accommodated as they become relevant.

Input and output formats can be specified independently (SMPTE ST2110, SRT, JPEG XS or NDI® to any one of these). Multi-­format input instances can be configured with the HOME Stream Transcoder.

Thanks to a new “Input Video Resolution” setting for HOME Multiviewer called “Dynamic”—and in collaboration with .edge, HOME, and VSM—HOME Multiviewer now allows operators to automatically save IP bandwidth and CPU load by using the multiviewer PiPs (picture-in-picture) more efficiently.

Most multiviewer layouts consist of large and smaller PiPs. So far, the video streams for all PiPs were transmitted to the multiviewer head either at full resolution or using one of the proxies .edge IP gateway and processing platform with a .proxy license generates.

Assigning streams to PiPs used to be a manual—and relatively static—process. This often resulted in information overkill for small PiPs, because they received more data than they required. .edge with a .proxy license automatically generates and transmits three proxies at different resolutions: 1/4, 1/16 and 1/64 the original size—plus the full-resolution stream.

HOME is aware of this and automatically selects the resolution that best matches each individual PiP, whether proxy or full-bandwidth feed. It even changes the assignment when you resize a given PiP using theWALL—dynamically and automatically.

This way, fewer megabits need to travel from .edge to a HOME Multiviewer head, more multiviewer instances can be used on the same server—and more network bandwidth is available for other streams. Additionally, dynamic changes to the size of PIPs no longer require substantial amounts of business logic for the VSM infrastructure controller to route the most appropriate proxy to a specific PIP.

Click here to watch an introductory video.