Master Thesis: Performance and Scalability of MXL for Software-Based Live Media Production

Net Insight (Nasdaq Stockholm: NETI B) is a Swedish media technology company based in Solna, Stockholm. Its Nimbra products are used by broadcasters, production companies and service providers around the world to transport live video for sports, news and entertainment. About Nimbra Edge Nimbra Edge is Net Insight's cloud-native platform for live media transport. It runs in public, private and hybrid cloud environments and controls both software and physical media-processing appliances. Live streams can be transported using technologies such as RIST, SRT and Zixi, and processed, monitored or transcoded along the way. About The Team And The Thesis Opportunities The Nimbra Edge team works across this entire chain, from the control plane and user interface to low-latency video and audio processing and transport. We are looking for master's thesis students interested in real-world problems in live media systems. The topics below are intended as starting points, and the exact scope can be adapted together with the student and university. Research question Which system, workload and deployment factors have the greatest impact on the performance and scalability of MXL-based live media pipelines? About MXL And The Assignment MXL (Media eXchange Layer) is an open-source SDK for exchanging uncompressed video, audio and data between software media functions. Investigate its performance in realistic live-production workloads and build a reproducible benchmark that can be used to understand where its practical limits and bottlenecks are. Possible areas to investigate

• producer–consumer versus one-to-many or many-to-one workflows.
• increasing the number of simultaneous video and audio streams.
• different resolutions, frame rates and media formats.
• x86 versus ARM systems.
• native processes versus containers or Kubernetes.
• same-host versus inter-host media exchange.
• MXL Flow API versus Fabric API use cases.
• CPU affinity, NUMA placement and memory contention.
• behaviour when CPU or memory bandwidth becomes constrained.
• different buffering and application access patterns.
• direct MXL integration versus frameworks such as GStreamer.
• scalability when several independent media functions share the same host.

Suggested measurements Useful measurements could include end-to-end and tail latency, jitter, CPU usage, memory bandwidth, memory footprint, missed real-time deadlines, throughput and the maximum number of streams a system can sustain. Optional comparison Where useful, MXL can also be compared with a simpler reference implementation, such as a minimal shared-memory producer–consumer pipeline, to estimate the overhead introduced by the media exchange layer itself. Scope and flexibility The exact experiments do not need to cover all of these areas. A thesis could instead select a small number of system variables and investigate them in depth, with the benchmark and methodology forming an important part of the contribution. About Net Insight Net Insight (Nasdaq: NETI B) provides the highest performing, most open video transport and media cloud technology for content providers as the industry standard for flexibility and service across live contribution, distribution and remote production media workflows. For over 25 years, the world’s leading content owners, broadcasters, production companies, service providers and enterprises have trusted Net Insight’s Emmy® Award winning Nimbra technology to guarantee media delivery. Today, Net Insight partners with hundreds of customers in over 70 countries to ensure media flows across managed and unmanaged IP networks, and the cloud – from anywhere, to everywhere. It enables customers to get the best from any mix of virtualized, cloud and IP technology and is the only platform to support all the major industry standards, protocols and clouds. Welcome to Net Insight, where innovation, collaboration, and trust are the cornerstones of our success. As one team, we are committed to delivering value to our customers, contributing to the growth and success of our company. Together we create a dynamic and positive workplace where everyone is valued, engaged and empowered to make an impact