Cheetah Technologies is making bold claims for its new V-Factor Stream Probe Advanced system with Intelligent Decode, calling it a breakthrough solution that enables cable system operators to achieve unprecedented accuracy and scalability in digital video monitoring.
The Intelligent Decode feature, the cornerstone of the latest release to Cheetah’s V-Factor Quality of Experience video monitoring platform, enhances the ability of operators to measure the quality of encoded video as it leaves the headend by providing measurements for blockiness, blackout, frozen video and jerkiness that accurately match human observation.
Intelligent Decode allows operators to monitor up to 30-120 HD MPEG-2 video channels post-encoder in a 1RU to 2RU platform with results that are objective and repeatable. Stream Probe Advanced (SPa) combines the ability to detect visual errors with MPEG and IP analysis. The Intelligent Decode functionality provides the industry’s most comprehensive single solution for IP, MPEG, Coding and Picture monitoring.
“The only way to ensure video quality is to ‘look’ at the images,” said Jeremy Bennington, vice president and general manager of Cheetah V-Factor. “Intelligent Decode builds on more than 10 years of V-Factor technology and human vision research to enable the operator to see what the subscriber sees, and to proactively correct errors as quickly as possible.”
Cheetah’s V-Factor portfolio featuring the Stream Probes and the V-Factor Source Monitor is based on products and technologies recently acquired from Symmetricom, Inc. V-Factor’s Human Vision System enables operators to detect, isolate and troubleshoot video providing accurate and repeatable measurements on how the video content actually appears to viewers.
The V-Factor Source Monitor (VF-SM) analyses multiple HD or SD video streams as they are received in a headend to benchmark, identify trends and poor quality events before an operator packages the video for distribution. In addition to providing valuable objective monitoring data to complement existing validation relying on Golden Eyes, V-Factor SM ideally automates tasks which previously relied solely on human observation—such as video equipment qualification or competitive analysis between existing video services.
V-Factor Stream Probe Advanced is used after the video has been encoded, transcoded, muxed and processed for network transmission. VF-SPa is critical to not only analysing the IP and MPEG aspects of the video, but also ensuring that no visual impairments have been introduced by the operator while processing the video. V-Factor Stream Probe Standard (VF-SPs) offers a comprehensive analysis of IP, MPEG and MPEG video coding layer attributes to ensure any network transmission trends and events are reported. VF-SPs is typically deployed in the network, hub sites, and can also be embedded in edge derives and set-top boxes.
