MPEG Monitor

For each monitored audio video program, the quality scores computed in real time by MPEG Monitor can be used to trigger alerts (by SNMP traps or emails) and to save audio video samples of problems. All measured data are saved so that they can be consulted later (locally or remotely).

When a problem of quality loss is detected, audio and/or video samples can be saved for later examination. These samples can be saved from X seconds BEFORE the problem to Y seconds AFTER the problem (X and Y are user-defined).

At start up, MPEG Monitor displays a window which mainly contains three parts. On the top of the window, you can see the SAP announces and detect streams corresponding to these SAP announces or coming from a particular server (manually entered). On the middle of the window, the detected audio and video streams are displayed. On the bottom of the window, the programs are displayed. Each program is an association of one video stream (or none) and one or two audio streams (or none).

MPEG Monitor can detect one or several streams from UDP, RTP, RTSP, HTTP or HLS (HTTP Live Streaming). Each Transport Stream can contain one or several programs. For each program, the video can be encoded in MPEG-2 or MPEG-4/AVC (H.264). Concerning the audio encoding, you just have to install the appropriate DirectShow decoder(s) and MPEG Monitor will support your audio streams. MPEG Monitor can process streams coming from one or several servers. Each server can stream in unicast or multicast.

When streams are detected from an SAP announce or from the IP address and port you specifed, these streams are displayed in the list located in the middle of the window.

For a quick start, you can create programs by associating the first video stream with the first audio stream, the second video stream with the second audio stream, etc.

You can also create custom associations between video streams and audio streams. And several buttons can help you by creating associations automatically.

When you start the monitoring, MPEG Monitor displays one main window which shows all the monitored programs. For each program, the decoded video is displayed in real time and the volumes of the audio streams are indicated (if there are associated audio streams).

And for each program, one audio quality score and three video quality scores are computed:

• the video quality score taking into account only the encoding artifacts ("Enc" score)
• the video quality score taking into account only the transmission errors ("Tra" score)
• the video quality score taking into account both the encoding artifacts and the transmission errors ("VQ" score)

MPEG Monitor also displays other windows showing:

• the video quality curves of each program
• the audio quality curves of each program
• the video bitrate curves of each program (to see how the different video streams share the bandwidth)
• the audio bitrate curves of each program (to see how the different audio streams share the bandwidth)
• the list of the last 1000 triggered alerts
• the list of the alerts which are being sent
• the status of each program (with OK/Warning/Error icons and information about the last alert, if any)
• the system clock

And if you have any video and/or audio rendering cards installed on your PC (like Blackmagic Design cards for example), they wil be detected when MPEG Monitor starts and buttons (as the ones labelled "0" and "1" on the presented screenshot) will enable you to send the video and audio streams of a given program to these audio video devices. So you are able to see each program on a separate screen, to view it in full size. There is even one option to automatically display programs having problems on this separate screen.