flow-docs

About Amino

Amino helps with data collection for different sports matches. It is a kind of Set-top-box that helps the data collection teams gather data more efficiently.

It consists of the small box itself with a keypad and/or remote control for TRICKPLAYing options (pause, step forward/backward per frame or second).

It receives the stream and displays it on a screen and the team can pause it or move forwards and backward in it by frame or seconds. Then they can return to the live stream, but it also offers slow motion for much more precise data.

The team watches the stream (and uses the TRICKPLAY options if needed) and they enter a different kind of data about the match in the data collection tool as soon as possible.

About ExAmino

This project was created to make a software video player that will replace the Amino hardware player after its retirement. The challenge is to make the stream itself as low latency as possible for more accurate results.

The goals of the project:

• provide a player that can play the incoming streams in the browsers and for that
• convert the (non-browser-compatible) SRT streams to a new format, that said player can play
• send the frame id via the WebSocket connection, which is a helpful feature for those who require this data for displaying information to the user (like live player positions). It makes the visualizations more precise and easier to create (no need for frame calculations from timestamps)
• create a virtual dashboard, where the user can see the available streams

The video and the audio in the stream are compressed with a codec (usually h264 aac). To be able to give it to a browser, the codecs need to be put into a container.

A container tells the browser about a codec part that contains a video fragment and its duration. SRT is just like that, but cannot be played in the browser, so it has to be converted (Amino helps with this).

Many features of Amino are also present in this project like low latency streaming and TRICKPLAY. TRICKPLAY can be controlled via keyboard shortcuts.

Another feature that is in the exAmino project is that the stream itself is copied to a machine in the office, which helps to take off the load on the network.