Dealing with HD (High Definition) content and SD (Standard Definition) Channels

Due to the switchover currently happening in moving all channels to HD, sometimes trafficking systems like S4M may have been told to produce a playlist that contains an event which is HD media on a SD channel. Usually operations will catch this and substitute the HD content with the SD version. If they don’t then the playout server would crash on attempting to play the HD content on the SD channel. Some broadcasters may have a single playout server broadcasting for multiple channels, so crashing a server would essentially bring down all those channels too. Finally, there are usually backup servers which are hooked up as dual support, so the final chain result would bring down the backups also.

How do we prevent this? Well, in the S4M case, it does track whether an event is in HD or SD, but the vanilla install of S4M doesn’t pass this field through to the playlist. So we weighed the cost of asking S4M to make the code change to add the <highdefinition> node to the dlevent node such as:

<dlevent>
...
<highdefinition>1</highdefinition>
</dlevent>

Against the cost of several channels not airing for some downtime. Presented with this tradeoff, the executives went ahead and asked S4M to make the code change.
Now, in my broadcaster’s particular case, S4M does not produce a playlist that our playout servers can understand, since S4M naturally writes in H-series format but our playout servers are DALs, and need D-series playlists. Therefore we decided that the translator I wrote to convert H-series to D-series playlists be modified to identify events that are HD (have a value of 1), and check to see if the channel is HD or not. If there is HD content scheduled for a non-HD channel, then operations will be alerted by adding HD to the column where the dlhnumber normally goes. My broadcaster uses dlhnumber to store the tape number of the content to play out, so since this content won’t be played out, we decided to substitute that value with a flag indicating HD content has been scheduled for a SD channel. Using the event id in the playlist, operational staff can check back to see what content was intended to be played and manually add in the SD version.