New Video Streaming Solutions for the Battlefield

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The video and metadata requirements of modern military and defense missions have been evolving rapidly, making live, real-time video delivery and management in the tactical arena a true challenge.

New encoding solutions and IPTV management system are designed to allow military personnel to easily disseminate live feeds and recorded video assets in various bit-rates optimized for the specific network link available, whether stationary or in the field.

Vitec, which expertises in advanced video encoding and streaming solutions, has been showcasing its point-to-point streaming and full motion video (FMV) solutions engineered for mission-critical and tactical military and defense operations.

One of the company’s innovations is the credit card-sized MGW Pico TOUGH, the world’s smallest, most power-efficient MIL-STD certified H.264 HD/SD encoding solution and streaming appliance.

Weighing less than 400 grams, MGW Pico TOUGH sets a new standard of performance for manned and unmanned airborne platforms, military vehicles, and ground units, packing all the needed capabilities for any Surveillance, Intelligence, and Reconnaissance (ISR) sensor or Situational Awareness video in an ultra-small airborne and marine certified enclosure.

The device consumes less than 7 watts of power for 1080p encoding with KLV STANAG 4609 metadata and features simultaneous, low-latency streaming of two sources from HD-SDI and analog composite signals, JITC-compliant metadata processing, AES encryption, reliable transport/error correction technology, real-time resolution scaling, image cropping, and full-size snapshot capture.

The rugged enclosure uses MIL-DTL-38999 connectors and is certified for extreme environmental conditions, according to the company’s website.

Another product is the MGW Ace Encoder and Decoder, the industry’s first entirely portable, encode/decode solution. The powerful yet compact appliance provides pristine video quality with its bandwidth-efficient compression as well as legacy H.264 encoding capabilities. It offers a quality solution for streaming video, audio, and KLV metadata while in the field or on the move with, up to 50 percent bandwidth savings compared to today’s H.264 standards.

The MGW Ace Decoder features a robust, portable enclosure suited for field use and provides best-in-class video quality over rich and industry-standard audio/video connectivity. It delivers bandwidth-efficient, error-free video streaming over any network, including the internet, with embedded error-correction capabilities.

Another product developed by VITEC is the FITIS (Fully Integrated Tactical IPTV System), an integrated full motion video solution for capturing, processing, archiving, indexing, managing, and disseminating tactical ISR video and metadata. Designed for rapid deployments and efficient distribution of IP video across LANs and WANs and in any network configuration, it enables real-time playback of tactical and situational awareness imagery, continuous recording and indexing of metadata, and retrieval of vital video assets and analysis notes. It supports propagation of scenario-specific video imagery in a variety of formats and bandwidth constraints from high-definition ISR footage for analysts, to ultra-compressed streams for transmission to tactical units at the edge.