News: Motama released NMM 2.2.0 and TVCaster-SDK

[Marco Lohse]

News

*Release of NMM 2.2.0 and TVCaster-SDK*

Motama released the next version of its Network-Integrated Multimedia
Middleware (NMM) for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X: NMM 2.2.0 Codename
"Sunshine", available from http://www.motama.com/nmm.html

Together with this release, the first version of the new TVCaster
Software Developer Kit (TVCaster-SDK) is made available at
http://www.motama.com/tvcastersdk.html

The free TVCaster-SDK provides following benefits for all IPTV servers
from Motama:

- Enables full programmability and remote control of TVCaster
appliances using C++ API (Windows, Linux, Mac OS) or XML-RPC (all
platforms)

- Client-side sample application, including channel switching

- Full integration into distributed stream processing

- Based on award winning Network-Integrated Multimedia Middleware
(NMM) by Motama


Release notes for NMM 2.2.0:

*Communication Architecture*

- Shared bindings allow two NMM applications to communicate using a
single TCP or UDP connection, even if multiple independent out-of-band
bindings are active. This may significantly reduce the number of open
connections, especially in "remote control" applications, which access
many remote NMM nodes using interfaces. In addition, connection setup
using shared bindings is faster if a shared binding already exists.

- Shared bindings are now used by default. Applications can still
create separate connections with custom configurations by requesting
"private bindings". See the example shared_bindings.cpp and the
communication framework documentation for details.

- Optimized connection-setup for out-of-band bindings. This change
benefits both shared and private bindings, as well as flow graph
setup.

- Fixed a bug in exception serialization, which prevented exceptions
of the wrong type to be rethrown at the caller of a distributed method

- Added a new transport strategy, RTPTSSenderStrategy, which can be
used to receive an MPEG TS or DVB stream using the RTP protocol. This
is a lightweight version of the RTPStrategy, and does not depend on
any external library.

- Added a new transport strategy, InstreamDummyStrategy, which can be
used as a placeholder for unused instream communication roles. For
example, if no upstream messages are sent between two nodes of a flow
graph, an InstreamDummyStrategy can be assigned to the upstream
direction.

*Synchronization Architecture*

- When adding a sink controller to a synchronizer, the synchronization
architecture now measures the offset of the system clocks of the hosts
on which the controller and synchronizer are running. If the offset is
too large, a TimeOffsetException is thrown. This allows applications
to detect large clock offsets, which prevent NMM synchronization from
working properly.

*TVCaster SDK*

- Added interfaces for accessing Motama's new TVCaster appliance from
NMM-based applications. This allows application developers to interact
with TVCaster and perform the same operations which are available in
the web interface from within custom client applications.

*Plugins*

- All interfaces of plugins and other components which are available
on Linux are now also available on Windows. This allows Windows
applications to remotely control nodes running on a Linux host, even
if a type of node is not available on Windows.

- Added new clic graph descriptions for MPEG and AVI video playback
with different audio formats, and playback of live DVB streams

- Improved DVBS2ReadNode. Added support for new features, such as
channel search, and upgraded to Linux DVB API version 5.1

- Added new channel configuration and tuning files for use with
DVBS2ReadNode

- Added a new node, AnalyseDataIDNode, which can be used as a template
for nodes using data analysis to determine the exact input
format. This node can be used, e.g. as a basis for developing new
decoder plug-ins.

*Miscellaneous Features*

- The default listening port of the ServerRegistry is now configurable
in the .nmmrc configuration file (or nmm.ini on Windows). This setting
affects the serverregistry application, as well as all client
applications making connections to a ServerRegistry or running an
internal ServerRegistry by themselves.

- The default verbose level of NMM is now configurable in the .nmmrc
configuration file (or nmm.ini on Windows).

- Various bugfixes and performance improvements.

*Platforms and Compilers*

- Added support for GCC 4.5.0