NMOS: What’s In It For You? More Than You Think

When people talk about NMOS, what they typically mean is IS-04, discovery, and IS-05, registration. 

But the reality is, NMOS does so much more than IS-04 and IS-05. And it's unfortunate that that’s largely unknown to most people. 

If you don’t know what NMOS is capable of, you’re not asking manufacturers for it. And if you’re a manufacturer, you’re not building it into your new products. And that’s a lost opportunity, as we’ll discuss in this blog post, as well as the next. NMOS goes far beyond its well-known IS-04 and IS-05 protocols, offering a comprehensive suite of tools for managing IP-based media networks – from dynamic signal routing and device configuration to security and monitoring. This complete toolset can make it easier for you to handle resource management, signal connections, and system maintenance across your entire media infrastructure.

NMOS: What's in it for me?

            Editor’s note: This blog post is based on the 2024 NAB IPSHOWCASE presentation of Stefan Ledergerber at Simplexity in Zurich, Switzerland. You can view the full presentation NMOS: What’s In It For Me? above, or on YouTube. 

​Let’s start by looking at a typical IP installation. To understand NMOS's full capabilities, consider this scenario: You’re doing dynamic signal management and you want to start switching the signals between A and B. You have to configure correct stream formats again and again, unless you keep them static. But you’re using IP because you want flexibility, right? So it has to be set up correctly. And by the way, the conventional device settings are not going to go away. You still need to do multi-viewer setup, mic preamp control, and so on.

Then you need to monitor your installation. You need to know whether it's working fine. And you want to be able to find faults very quickly. And you also want to be able to move or replace products, moving  them around within pools. 

You want to keep a number of devices in a pool and just take them out and connect them somewhere because that's where you need the device right now. And if you do that, then you need to discover where you just connected them because otherwise, they're invisible and not controllable. And what you also need to do is make sure that a new device gets the correct basic setup. Last but not least, you need to constantly ensure that the security standards in your network are met.

So if you look at those scenarios and challenges, the question is, what can NMOS do for you in terms of what's defined in NMOS in these very practical situations? 

Resource Management

What does NMOS specify in terms of managing your resources? NMOS describes a central inventory system, which can work across subnets and across the whole infrastructure. 

The centralized inventory system allows you to:

• find devices and their IP senders and receivers

• read out by spec what a certain sender or receiver is able to do and which format it supports

• see what you can connect to a sender or receiver, or what kind of format it’s able to generate

• look at which streams belong to each other, which is called natural grouping

• give a device a label or tags

• put in any kind of device description

There is one more thing in resource management beyond these core features. It's possible to read out the system-wide parameters you have decided to use. For instance, PTP domains. You can read that out via a special mechanism.

Signal Management

This is the more dynamic part of day-by-day operation. Let’s walk through an example of 2 AV devices. They may contain all kinds of things you want to control like: 

• baseband inputs and outputs

• a matrix in there to switch between these inputs and outputs and maybe others or into a sender or receiver

• metering data

• GPIOs

• thumbnails on the video side

NMOS is able to control those elements inside AV devices and connect them to other devices. Breaking this down, of course you have senders to receivers, but also more than that. NMOS also specifies how you select baseband inputs and feed them into a sender. It also specifies in which baseband outputs a receiver should be fed on a monogranularity of an audio channel. It also allows you to transfer GPIO. 

So signal management means connecting all kinds of signals from a sender to a receiver or from one device to another. What everyone knows is that NMOS can connect pre-configured senders to receivers. That means you can assign multicast addresses, making it possible to reach the point where these multicast addresses are not statically typed into a device. NMOS describes clearly how to assign to a sender a certain multicast address. 

The same goes for enabling and disabling senders and receivers. Maybe you want to stop the packets coming out. You can do that with NMOS. Think of it as a copy-paste of a transport file, so an STP file from a sender to a receiver. 

More than that, you can use any generic data source. For example, button press or audio levels, which are generating constantly changing values, and you can look at such a data source as a sender and connect that sender to a receiver. And it will transmit the constantly changing values almost as if it would be audio or video, but in a much lower bandwidth consumption. 

So using this kind of functionality, you can implement, for instance, generic control panels where button pushes are transmitted from one source to a destination, and then they react to that button push. So that's also something you can do with NMOS.

Another thing not a lot of people are aware of is that you can control the baseband matrix. You can set a baseband matrix and say which channels you want in your senders and receivers. 

Then there is stream compatibility management, which allows you to ask a sender what can you do? What kind of stream formats do you support? And you can ask a receiver what kind of stream formats can you receive? And then as a control system, you can choose the perfect match. It allows you to choose a certain stream format on a sender freely via a specified control command. 

So you may be able to do what the ProAV guys want to do with HDMI, which is just plug in and then it adjusts and finds out what's the best resolution. Via this mechanism, a control system could switch the stream format accordingly, so the receiver can actually receive it in the best possible resolution or quality. 

So that’s signal management and resource management. In part 2, we’ll delve into device settings and monitoring, and finally, security.  

If you’ve already found out one or two things that NMOS can do for you that you didn’t know before, you’re invited to find out even more by joining AMWA. As a member, you can take part in online forums that provide a place for open technical discussions and consensus between a wide range of end users and suppliers. Join today and be a part of the future of NMOS.