Qvest reduces bandwidth consumption with a new orchestration layer

With mxl‐k8s and go‐mxl, That's it develops two new open source projects that address the main challenges of modern broadcast architectures in the context of dynamic multimedia facilities (DMF) and promote their practical implementation in Kubernetes-based environments.

Qvest's solution addresses one of the main challenges of Scalability in DMF-based architectures. Often, multiple applications simultaneously access the same stream, causing significant bandwidth inefficiencies, increased costs, and increasing complexity that increases with each additional application.

Daniel Classen, practice director of custom software solutions at Qvest, says, "With uncompressed UHD streams in the range of 10 Gbit/s and beyond, this is not a marginal issue, but rather an important economic factor. Our approach ensures that streams are processed at most once per node within the cluster. This lays the foundation for more efficient and future-proof multimedia platforms."

Qvest addresses this challenge with mxl‑k8s, which allows a scalable and converged use of MXL on multiple nodes within a cluster. Media streams are shared within a node, regardless of the number of applications accessing them.

On a technical level, Qvest extends the DMF architecture with an orchestration layer Cluster-wide for MXL: As a software layer, MXL provides a standardized mechanism for exchanging media streams between applications and can be integrated directly into products. Automated orchestration of this exchange between multiple nodes and systems is deliberately outside the scope of the MXL core and has so far been implemented on a project-specific basis.

With mxl‑k8s, the transport between MXL nodes It is available for the first time as an automated feature of the cluster, without the need to implement it within each media function. This removes a key scalability limitation of modern multimedia architectures. For applications, it eliminates the need to consider the origin or routing of a flow.

For its part, go‑mxl, Qvest's Go link for MXL libraries implemented in C/C++, further simplifies integration into modern software stacks and makes the technology accessible to a broader developer base.

"MXL is designed as a layer for integration into software products. In environments with multiple systems, an additional orchestration layer becomes essential. This is precisely the layer we are adding now, allowing fully automated operation throughout the cluster. Early feedback from the industry confirms the strong demand for this type of orchestration," summarizes Daniel Clasen.

It should be noted that Qvest offers both projects as open source, allowing the sector to further develop the approaches and integrate them into their own systems.