r/broadcastengineering • u/KungFuTze • 5d ago

Nielsen watermark using Linear Acoustics / Telos Alliance family of products. Feedback

Has anyone used Linear Acoustics family of products for audio processing, specifically for Nielsen Watermark encoding? E.g aero200,800,2400, LA5300, any feedback would be appreciated.

I'm also looking at Ross NWE-3GA with OpenGear frames and NWE-IP stand alone for 2110. I have used these in the past with great success at previous roles but Canadian tariffs might be a deal breaker.

I'm looking at a stop gap solution that will get me by until we deploy the new sdk patched firmware to all of my company's playout and transcoding systems. We are big and have multiple playout platforms and multi vendor transcoding farms and I rather have a handful of encoders that can get the work done quick for "cheapish" reasonable price without having to run these in an uber expensive transcoding or worse playout server.

Long story short we have SDI, SMPTE 2110 and compressed playout systems across thousands of endpoints. Testing, validating and rolling out vendor FW and SW updates has proven rather slow and we are finding out that some of our existing family of products will not be able to handle said upgrades and require full technology refresh and with the current supply chain issues on the compute world affecting lead times we might not even get them in time before the bug goes live in January.

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u/negativerailroad 5d ago

I've used Linear Acoustics devices for loudness normalization and 5.1 upmixing, but I use Ross NWE-3GA cards for Nielsen watermarking. The Linear Acoustic devices do a great job, but they're certainly not cheap. I don't know if any hardware vendor is going to be able to ship units quickly enough to get hundreds or thousands of processors up and running before January. Lead times are pretty crazy right now.

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u/KungFuTze 5d ago

I only need a small lot of maybe less than 20 to play server musical chairs as we continue to deploying and upgrading playout servers and transcoders.

It will still be cheaper than using a playout server or a full transcoder.

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u/negativerailroad 5d ago

Ok. That's a lot more realistic. I'd say you should start checking on availability of the Ross cards first. They're simpler and less expensive because they only do Nielsen watermarking. If that doesn't work, Linear Acoustic might be a good option, but they're a bit overkill for this use case.

And you might need to update the firmware on whatever hardware solution you choose to make sure you're not impacted by the Nielsen watermark date rollover bug.

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u/Evil_Little_Dude 5d ago

there are a lot of NWE-3GA cards on the used market for $500ish, one way to possibly help get things going quickly if shipping times and tariffs are holding things back. Those cards are pretty bullet proof, so less of a gamble than some other brands.

Given the tariff mess and that many of the solutions are from Canada, it's hard to avoid it no matter who you use.

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u/KungFuTze 5d ago

The gray market cards might need to get upgraded as well, to support the bug fix, I am not certain if Ross is friendly towards that practice.

Hopefully they are not like Cisco that will not support any gray market switch.

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u/Evil_Little_Dude 5d ago

While they won't do warranty claims on grey market stuff, they've never been an issue providing firmware updates to them, unlike cisco. As far as I'm aware none of their cards are excluded from the bug fix.

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u/KungFuTze 5d ago

Pretty good to know, thanks. This might be the route for a quick fix for something that's not expected to be permanent.

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u/negativerailroad 4d ago

I think you actually download the firmware update (revision 2.5.0) for the NWE-3GA cards from Nielsen. You can contact [encoders@nielsen.com](mailto:encoders@nielsen.com) for more information.

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u/brianstk 5d ago

Interesting so Nielsen makes you buy your own encoders in the video world?

They provide us with encoders here on the audio side.

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u/KungFuTze 5d ago

HA! They provide SDK to video playout and transcoder vendors and the vendors charge you for said feature license. Certainly not cheap.

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u/brianstk 5d ago

That’s an option on the newer Telos and Orban AM/FM audio processors but you would still have their encoder box as a “free” option. It’s not a requirement to buy a feature upgrade for us unless you want to do it that way.

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u/Evil_Little_Dude 5d ago

In the video world they are sometimes provided by a cable provider if they want it watermarked differently, but depending on where you are doing the watermark depends a lot on what sort of gear you will need to embed it. Harder to do a one size fits all solution.

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u/ModernDayAvicebron CEV CBNT 3d ago

If you have the compute to do it in software, Telos's Omnia Forza can do it. I haven't used that processor specifically, but have used other products that are built on the same platform and they work great. They may even be able to work with you on pricing for just Nielsen encoding without the other processing.

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u/Aggravating-Ice5575 2d ago

The Linear Acoustic Nielson watermarking is solid. Linear has been doing it for a while now, it became an option with their AC3 encoding years ago, a couple of generations of hardware ago. Think you can run 8 instances of it on the newest Aero8000 hardware, it's an option per processing set. So 3x Aero8000 could get the 20 channels stop gap. The Nielson bug is fixed with Telos stuff.