Architecture
Antares architecture has the following components:
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The ESG Engine features handles a clusterable database that efficiently caches the information tree, creates suitable fragments and generates the contents ready to be broadcast as announce carousels or multicast sessions.
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The ESG Frontend is in charge of generating actual multicast data streams containing announces and fragment information as well as auxiliary files such as images or SDP files. This frontend are multicast data stream sent to the IP Encapsulator. Some frontendscan provide data interactive access. Usually we use FLUTE[3] for the unicast ESG data stream; this is the perfect protocol for unstable multicast distribution. FLUTE allows the compression (gzip) to improve the wide band, and the forward error correction (FEC) to to detect and correct errors. Both announce carousels and multicast sessions, that contents the ESG fragments, can beconfigurated to obtain the sent information required prioritys.
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The Information Service Aggregators are plug-in modules that extract and customize information from several sources (such as live DVB feeds – EIT tables - from satellite or terrestrial signals over IP, XMLTV EPG sources, scheduled playout from VoDKA) and feed the Antares database. The aggregators convert the received information into the internal Antares format, doing the necessary changes. Once we have the data, we can broadcast it in any supported output format, so we can construct the aggregators depending on the neccesity to be integrated with the end platforms systems, without modifying the frontend.