NetInsight N400
Broadcast-Grade IP Media Transport Appliance

What I shipped

• Primary engineer on the FFmpeg major-version migration — the largest engineering effort on the product line — porting every custom C++ encode/decode/interleave module from FFmpeg 3.8 to 6.0 then 7.x.
• Used a GDB crash-driven methodology with Valgrind/Heaptrace validation to reverse-engineer the proprietary fork against upstream FFmpeg history.
• Unlocked 4:2:2 10-bit at 4K, added H.266/VVC support, re-implemented Intel QSV H.264/HEVC acceleration for the new FFmpeg API at sustained real-time throughput on 4 simultaneous encode channels, expanded supported ANC data types, and improved CBR quality verified against DekTec StreamXpert.
• Fixed SMPTE 2038 ANC, SCTE-35 splice markers, HEVC interlace field-order, AAC, AC-3 passthrough and HRD signalling for broadcast compliance.
• Found and patched an SSH public key exposure in the VA20 web UI before customer deployment.

About the platform

The Nimbra 400 is a broadcast-grade IP media transport appliance — encoding, decoding and transporting broadcast-quality video over managed/unmanaged IP networks using RIST, Zixi, SMPTE FEC 2022-1, and SRT. TekMedia owned the full product line for NetInsight (Stockholm), and I owned the media-engine modernisation.

More of what I built

• C++ engineering: RAII, smart pointers, STL containers chosen per access pattern, lock-free ring buffers, zero-copy media processing, POSIX sockets, IPC.
• Production core-dump analysis and crash triage (GDB, Valgrind, Heaptrace) for field-deployed units.
• Opensourced MPEG-TS-Generator (Go) — browser-based custom TS test-feed generation from a personal computer, eliminating shared broadcast hardware.
• Built an internal real-time YUV plane visualiser + raw-video analyzer (Python) for NV12→NV16 pixel-format debugging.
• CPU-affinity pinning for legacy VA18 hardware so encoder/decoder ran week-long stability tests without frame drops.
• Validated releases VA18, VA20 (4K-capable) and VA22 across 4 full testing cycles, including third-party interop with Kiloview/DekTec.
• Covered the full regression scope — H.264, HEVC, VVC, AAC, AC-3, SMPTE 2038 ANC, SCTE-35, interlaced and progressive across SD/HD/4K, over transport protocols Zixi, RIST, SRT, RTP, RTSP, UDP and TCP (unicast + multicast).
• Automated encode/decode test-cycle setup with Python, cutting configuration from ~15 minutes of manual work to a single command (~15x faster).