Haivision announced that its Makito SDI and Makito Air high definition H.264 encoders have received Joint Interoperability Test Command (JITC) certification — a U.S. government designation that guarantees interoperability of fielded systems, and ensures products comply with U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) standards for encoding Full Motion Video (FMV) for Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance applications (ISR).
The certification is granted only after JITC labs have performed exhaustive tests to validate compliance with the DoD Motion Imagery Standards Profile (MISP). Many DoD programs require both MISP compliance and JITC certification to ensure end-to-end interoperability with other FMV processing, management, and exploitation systems in use throughout the DoD and the intelligence community. Without JITC certification, customers have no way of knowing whether their encoded video will work with the entire FMV ecosystem currently deployed.
The Makito is Haivision's flagship HD encoder and has been used widely throughout the DoD in support of global ISR applications in both airborne and ground applications. The Makito is the first JITC-certified H.264 encoder capable of 1080p60 resolutions, achieving Motion Imagery Standards Board's (MISB) recommended practice for HD video distribution and acquisition — MISM Level 12 from RP 9720.
With the commercial Makito and the ruggedized Makito Air reaching JITC and MISM Level 12 compliance, Haivision has now achieved JITC certification for both airborne and ground-based encoding applications.
"Haivision made a company commitment to the ISR community in 2008," said Mirko Wicha, CEO of Haivision. "We are constantly focused on increasing the capabilities and applications of our low latency, metadata friendly, full motion video systems."
"We take our responsibility to this user community very seriously," said Andy Vaughan, vice president of U.S. federal sales for Haivision. "Haivision's U.S. federal team has worked diligently with ISR customers to ensure that our solutions meet their needs for mission-critical applications. JITC certification allows our customers to deploy field-proven, low-risk, off-the-shelf technology both on the ground and in the air."
The JITC certification process validated several of Makito's important features, according to the company, including very efficient compression of SD/HD video per SMPTE specifications (CBR); KLV metadata insertion via serial, Ethernet (UDP), and SDI/VANC; and frame-synchronous KLV metadata support per MISB Standard 0604. The testing also confirmed that Makito supports flexible encoding configurations for low bit rate applications, and HiLo-Streaming for multiple bit rates from the same video source.
The Makito Air is a DO-160-rated version of the non-ruggedized Makito board. Makito-SDI is available as a stand-alone appliance or can be installed in a 1-RU, 6-slot chassis.