What Is MDI - Media Delivery Index
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Understanding the Media Delivery Index (MDI)
What is the Media Delivery Index?
The Media Delivery Index (MDI) is an open standard used to ensure quality in IP video systems. It plays a crucial role in monitoring IP-encapsulated video signals in live systems, addressing common challenges that arise during video delivery over networks.
The Core Issue
When delivering IP-encapsulated video, packet loss is a major concern. Losing a single IP packet can lead to the loss of several media packets. Typically, systems using the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) can encapsulate up to seven MPEG Transport Stream packets per packet. Therefore, losing one UDP packet could result in multiple media packets being lost.
This packet loss disrupts content delivery, requiring devices like set-top boxes (STBs) to handle losses as effectively as possible. The impact varies depending on whether the packet contained video, audio, data, or other elements.
The Role of Jitter
Ideally, no packets would be lost across a network. However, jitter?"the variation in packet delivery times due to network buffering?"often causes packets to be delayed. This jitter requires network devices to have larger buffer sizes to accommodate and forward IP packets, which can complicate the delivery process.
Key Components of MDI
MDI consists of two main components:
1. MDI-MLR (Media Loss Rate): This measures the rate at which MPEG packets are lost.
2. MDI-DF (Delay Factor or Cumulative Jitter): This measures the required buffer size for a data flow at a specific network point. Expressed in milliseconds, the delay factor is dependent on the stream's bitrate. Higher bitrate streams typically result in lower delay factors as they are more susceptible to network jitter.
Understanding these components helps identify potential issues, making it clear that network performance varies with different stream bitrates. A network that handles standard definition streams well might struggle with high-definition streams due to their higher bitrates and increased susceptibility to jitter.
Industry Adoption
MDI was co-developed by Cisco, a leading network hardware provider, and Ineoquest, a top video monitoring solutions company. It is widely adopted by quality service providers and used in most Quality of Service (QoS) equipment.
MDI is valued for its scalability and robustness, as it considers both the IP and MPEG layers of monitoring. This dual-layer approach ensures comprehensive quality assurance in IP video systems.
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