UltraGrid - A High Definition Collaboratory
Copyright (c) 2001-2004 University of Southern California
Copyright (c) 2003-2004 University of Glasgow
Copyright (c) 2013-2014 Fundació i2CAT, Internet I Innovació Digital a Catalunya
Copyright (c) 2005-2018 CESNET z.s.p.o.
All rights reserved.
This software is distributed under license, see the file COPYRIGHT for
full terms and conditions.
About UltraGrid
UltraGrid brought by CESNET's Laboratory of Advanced Networking Technologies
(Sitola) is a software implementation of high-quality low-latency video and
audio transmissions using commodity PC and Mac hardware. Supported
resolutions range through HD (1920x1080) up to 4K (4096x2160) with up to 60
frames per second. The high-quality is achieved either by using uncompressed
streams or streams with very low compression ratio. End-to-end transmission
latency (i.e., all the way from the camera to the display) is about 100ms,
but it varies based on camera and capture cards being used. UltraGrid was
originally a research project used to demonstrate the possibilities of 10Gbps
networks and to study multi-point data distribution in such environments.
Recent advances in the field of GPU-accelerated low-latency codecs extend its
usability also to Gigabit networks. UltraGrid is supported on PCs with Linux
operating system and Macs with MacOS X. The software is open-source
distributed under BSD license, i.e., we're interested in both
research/academic and commercial applications. Nowadays, main application
areas are collaborative environments, medical, cinematography and
broadcasting applications, as well as various educational activities.
It is a fork of the original UltraGrid developed by Colin Perkins, Ladan
Gharai, et al..
Our work is supported by CESNET research intents "Optical Network of National
Research and Its New Applications" (MŠM 6383917201), CESNET Large
Infrastructure (LM2010005), CESNET E-Infrastructure (LM2015042) and partially
also by Masaryk University research intent "Parallel and Distributed Systems"
(MŠM 0021622419).
The contents of this directory are as follows:
COPYRIGHT Full license terms and conditions
INSTALL Installation instructions
NEWS Change log and modification history
README This file
REPORTING-BUGS Recommendations for reporting bugs
bin/ Compiled binaries
src/ Source code for the UltraGrid system
test/ Source code and binaries for test routines
Makefile.in Build script
acconfig.h " "
config.guess " "
config.sub " "
configure " "
configure.ac " "
install-sh " "
Hardware and Software Requirements
Recommended Hardware Setup:
64-bit CPU with at least 2 cores
Tested version: 2x 2-core Opteron CPUs,64-bit Ubuntu (both latest and LTS), Fedora, Debian and openSUSE
OpenGL3 - compatible card
Proprietary drivers strongly recommended
DXT compression on GPU is tested with OpenGL 3.3
JPEG compression requires NVidia GeForce 4xx or newer
For uncompressed 1.5Gbps streams (either sending or receiving), 10GbE network interface card is needed
We test with PCIe Myrinet 10GbE
For SDI send/receive capabilities, DVS, DeckLink, Magewell or Linsys Quad card is required
Magewell and Linsys modules in UG support only capturing
Video capture card should be located on a separate PCI bus from network card if possible.
Required Software Preliminaries
You will need this software (in brackets are optional features for which you'll need it):
X.Org and ATI/NVidia proprietary drivers (receiver - OpenGL/SDL display, sender - RTDXT compression)
SDL (SDL display)
OpenGL (RTDXT sender or OpenGL display on receiver)
GLEW library (DXT sender)
DVS SDK/Blackmagic drivers/Quad drivers
devel packages need to be installed as well
DVS SDK or VideomasterHD from Deltacast need to be obtained separately
because it cannot be distributed with UltraGrid (license). Please refer
our wiki for further information (https://github.com/CESNET/UltraGrid/wiki)
Using the UltraGrid System
The file INSTALL gives instructions for building the UltraGrid system.
Once the system has been built, the "uv" binary will be present. This
can be invoked as follows:
uv -d <display_device> -m <mtu> hostname (on the receiver)
uv -t <capture_device> -m <mtu> hostname (on the sender)
The <display_device> is one of the list viewed with '-d help'.
The <capture_device> is one of the list viewed with '-t help'. Name
of capture device usually follows with configuration of video mode,
video input etc. All options can be interactivelly shown.
The <mtu> specifies the maximum transfer unit of the network path from
sender to receiver (the default MTU is 1500 octets, suitable for use on
standard Ethernets). This parameter allows the application to make use
of networks with larger MTU, for example gigabit Ethernet using jumbo
frames.
Further options follow UltraGrid command-line help (-h) or visit our wiki
for further information (https://github.com/CESNET/UltraGrid/wiki/Running-UltraGrid)
As an example, if a user on host "ormal" wishes to send video captured
using a DVS HDstation card at 60 frames per second to another user on
host "curtis" with a display using the OpenGL driver, then the user on host
"ormal" would run where 38 indicates video format (here 1080i@30fps) and
2vuy tells it is an 8-bit YUV codec (also 10-bit is possible):
uv -t dvs:38:2vuy curtis
while the user on "curtis" would run:
uv -d gl ormal
The system requires access to UDP ports 5004 and 5005: you should open
these ports on any firewall on the network path. Uncompressed high definition
video formats require approximately 1 Gigabit per second of network capacity.
Using different supported compression schemes, the needed network capacity
can be as low as 10 Megabits per second for a high definition video.
Performance Tuning: Network
To achieve optimum performance with high definition video, it may be
necessary to tune your system's network parameters to more aggressive
values than used by default.
A key factor affecting performance is the path MTU. It is unlikely that
the system will sustain gigabit rates with the 1500 octet Ethernet MTU.
If using a gigabit Ethernet you may be able to improve performance by
setting an 8192 octet MTU on the interface, provided all intermediate
hops on the path from sender to receiver support the large MTU.
UltraGrid attempts to increase the UDP receive socket buffer from the
default value (typically 64 kilobytes) to 4/6 megabytes. If successful,
this will make the system more robust to scheduling variations and
better able to accept bursty packet arrivals. UltraGrid will notify
you if it cannot increase buffers. You should follow those instructions
and set your system according to it.
Interrupt processing load on the receiver host may be significant when
running at high rates. Depending on your network interface hardware it
may be possible to coalesce interrupts to reduce this load, although
the settings to do this are highly driver dependent. On FreeBSD, the
use of network device polling may also help performance: see the man
page for "polling" in section 4 of the manual.
In many cases, the performance of your network interface card may be
limited by host bus performance (this is particularly an issue at high
rates, for example when using HD format video).
Performance Tuning: Display devices
If using a HW grabbing card (eg. DVS) as a display device, the
key factor limiting performance is PCI bus contention. Ensure that
the grabbing card is on a separate PCI bus to the network card --
this typically requires a server class motherboard. On Linux, the
PCI bus topology can be displayed using "lspci -tv", for example:
[root@ormal root]# lspci -tv
-+-[03]---06.0 Xilinx, Inc.: Unknown device d150
+-[01]-+-02.0-[02]--+-04.0 Adaptec 7899P
| | \-04.1 Adaptec 7899P
| \-0e.0 3Com Corporation 3c985 1000BaseSX
\-[00]-+-00.0 ServerWorks CNB20HE
+-00.1 ServerWorks CNB20HE
+-00.2 ServerWorks: Unknown device 0006
+-00.3 ServerWorks: Unknown device 0006
+-04.0 Intel Corporation 82557 [Ethernet Pro 100]
+-0e.0 ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL
+-0f.0 ServerWorks OSB4
\-0f.1 ServerWorks: Unknown device 0211
[root@ormal root]#
showing an DVS card on PCI bus [03] (the card shows as a Xilinx
device) and a gigabit Ethernet card on PCI bus [02] (the 3Com entry).
For software display, you can use SDL or OpenGL display. Both are
accelerated (Mac and Linux) if you have properly configured video
drivers. On Linux, basic operability can be checked with following
commands. If configured properly, both should display driver
properties:
[root@ormal root]# glxinfo
<-- output omitted -->
and for SDL (accelerated through XVideo:
[root@ormal root]# xvinfo
<-- output omitted -->
If you intend to use some of DXT compressions, recommended driver
is OpenGL, which can display it natively. When using other display
drivers, decompression is still done throught OpenGL and then displayed
with requested video driver.
Performance Tuning: Other Factors
The UltraGrid system will attempt to enable POSIX real-time scheduling
to improve performance. This behaviour is disabled by default now, because
it can occupy the whole system when enabled, but it can be stil enabled by
'--enable-rt' configure option. If you see the message:
WARNING: Unable to set real-time scheduling
when starting the application, this means that the operating system did
not permit it to enable real-time scheduling. The application will run,
but with reduced performance. The most likely reason for failure to set
realtime scheduling is that the application has insufficient privilege:
it should either be run by root, or be made setuid root. A similar
message:
WARNING: System does not support real-time scheduling
indicates that your operating system does not support POSIX real-time
scheduling. The application will still run, but performance may be less
than desired.
You can find more operating system tweaks at this page:
https://github.com/CESNET/UltraGrid/wiki/OS-Setup-UltraGrid
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