Last week you read all about setting up buffers in VR-Vantage to best suit streaming video. This week I’ll talk about configuring VLC to receive video streams with low latency.

VLC is a commonly used application to show received network video streams out of Vantage and is used often in testing. (You can get VLC from their www.videolan.org/.) The default settings for viewing network streams in VLC includes quite a bit of buffering to make sure the video plays smoothly. Sometimes you want to see the video with as little latency as possible, which will require changing a few settings.

A common question I hear about video streaming setup is "how many buffers do I need?"  The answer is "it depends."  Let’s look at why and how you can determine for yourself the best setting for your system.

The weather in Atlantic city is definitely IFR conditions (&ldquoInstrument Flight Rules” - or for us recovering army helicopter pilots,“I Follow Roads”). There’s zero visibility and clouds all the way down to the surface. I’m not the least bit worried though, I’m at the Air Traffic Controller’s Technical Symposium with a large number people who are used to landing aircraft of any size in these conditions.

Ft. Lauderdale in February, AUSA is a great show to attend. This week we are showing how our simulated video technology can be used for stimulating SRI’s real-time video exploitation solution, TerraSight. We’re simulating a UAV flying over the convention center and vehicle traffic in the area.  Using VR-Vantage, we create the sensor view from the UAV and stream that video to TerraSight using MISB standard protocols.  By replicating the exact same data feed that a UAV would produce, integration was seamless. While I was explaining how this system could be used for training, mission rehearsal, or experimentation to a customer, they kept looking in the sky for the UAV. It wasn’t until I unattached the eye point from the UAV and flew around a bit that they were convinced it was a simulation.

When preparing fo the ATCA conferences this year, we wanted to show how MÄK tools can be used in the NextGen environment.  One example we showed used the VR-Exchange protocol translator to build a bridge connecting ADS-B traffic to simulation standard protocols, such as DIS and HLA Evolved (High Level Architecture).  By creating a custom Broker for VR-Exchange using the toolkit, it allowed us to bring in live air traffic to our synthetic environment in order to visualize the traffic as well as have our simulated entities respond to the live traffic.  This is just one example of how MÄK’s open toolkits allow for the products to be extended  and customized  for creating mission focused solutions.

I recently had need to compare to OMT files to see what would be required for bridging them using VR-Exchange.  Rather than doing it by hand, which would have most likely been a large waste of time and risked missing something important, I spent a few hours writing a tool that would compare two OMT files for me.

One of the issues of comparing OMT files is that a simple text based diff won''t give you the results you want because there is a lot of semantic information that needs to be compared.

The customer gave me two OMT files and said that they were both RPR FOM based with some extensions. That should simply work with VR-Exchange out of the box. However, using the OMTDiff tool we found that there were several enumerations with the same name, but with different values.  Using this information I was able to quickly create a modified HLA broker for VR-Exchange that intercepts these enumeration values and translates them properly.

Recently one of our customers contacted us for consulting on how to setup a large federation that would scale up to 1000 federates. Here is how we setup their federation for scaling to large numbers of federates.

Upon first arriving, we took a look at their Federation Object Model (FOM) to get an idea of what types of objects and interactions they were sending through the RTI and how much data was being used.