Ksolves Replaces a $50K Hardware ProcAmp With an OpenStack Browser Solution
A global broadcast and media technology organization providing live production infrastructure to broadcasters and sports rights holders worldwide depended on hardware ProcAmp units for real-time color correction during live events, expensive to scale, difficult to deploy remotely, and increasingly at odds with an industry moving toward software-defined production.
Ksolves brought web application development expertise to the challenge, proving that an open-stack, browser-accessible alternative could match hardware-grade real-time performance using SRT ingest, FFmpeg processing, and WebRTC delivery, with no proprietary infrastructure dependencies. The solution achieved sub-500ms glass-to-glass latency on commodity Linux hardware and cut per-seat cost by more than 90% compared to dedicated hardware.
Challenge
01
Hardware Cost and Scale Barrier: Dedicated ProcAmp hardware units cost upwards of $50,000 per seat and required physical on-site deployment, making it economically impractical to scale real-time color correction for multi-venue or remote production.02
Sub-Second Latency Requirement: Real-time color correction during live broadcast demands processing and preview latency well under one second, a constraint that rules out most cloud-based video pipeline approaches and requires purpose-built low-latency architecture.03
Dual Preview Stream Synchronisation: Directors and engineers needed simultaneous side-by-side views of the raw input and color-corrected output feeds with frame-accurate synchronization, technically difficult to achieve over WebRTC without careful stream management.04
Waveform and Vectorscope Monitoring in Browser: Professional broadcast workflows require real-time waveform and vectorscope overlays to validate signal levels and color gamut, capabilities that don't exist natively in browser environments and required custom canvas rendering.05
SRT Infrastructure Compatibility: The client's existing live production infrastructure used the SRT protocol for contribution feeds, requiring native SRT ingest rather than a protocol conversion that would add latency and complexity.06
Commodity Hardware Feasibility: To be commercially viable as a hardware replacement, the entire pipeline- SRT ingest, FFmpeg color grading, WebRTC encoding, waveform generation- had to run on standard Linux servers with no GPU acceleration or specialist broadcast hardware.Solution
Ksolves brought web application development expertise to the challenge, designing the system around a single performance constraint: every component in the pipeline had to contribute to a total glass-to-glass latency below 500 milliseconds on commodity Linux hardware.
- 01 SRT Ingest and FFmpeg Color Grading Pipeline: A server-side pipeline ingests live SRT contribution feeds and passes them through FFmpeg with real-time Gain, Hue, and Chroma filter parameters updated dynamically from the Vue.js control interface, applying broadcast-grade color correction without frame buffering.
- 02 Dual WebRTC Preview Streams: Two simultaneous WebRTC output streams, one for the raw input feed and one for the FFmpeg-corrected output, deliver to the browser in sync, enabling side-by-side director review at sub-500ms glass-to-glass latency.
- 03 Vue.js Real-Time Control Interface: A browser interface with live slider controls for Gain, Hue, and Chroma parameters applies FFmpeg filter changes in real time without stream interruption, giving operators hardware-equivalent control responsiveness from a standard browser tab.
- 04 Canvas-Based Waveform and Vectorscope: Custom Canvas API rendering delivers real-time waveform monitor and vectorscope overlays, sampling the corrected video stream client-side and drawing broadcast-standard luma and chrominance visualizations at frame rate with no server-side rendering overhead.
- 05 Commodity Linux Deployment Architecture: The full pipeline, SRT ingest, FFmpeg processing, WebRTC encoding, and signaling server, runs on a single standard Linux server instance, validating the hardware replacement on unmodified commodity infrastructure.
Technology Stack
| Category | Technology |
|---|---|
| Streaming | SRT Protocol Ingest |
| Video | FFmpeg Real-Time Color Grading |
| Frontend | Vue.js Control Interface |
| Streaming | WebRTC Dual Preview Streams |
| Frontend | Canvas API Waveform and Vectorscope |
- Per-Seat Hardware Cost Cut by Over 90%: Running on commodity Linux hardware with no specialist equipment cut per-seat cost by more than 90% compared to dedicated ProcAmp hardware requiring $50,000+ per unit.
- Sub-500ms Glass-to-Glass Latency Achieved: The full SRT to FFmpeg to WebRTC pipeline achieved sub-500ms glass-to-glass latency on commodity Linux hardware, meeting broadcast-grade real-time requirements that ruled out most conventional cloud video approaches.
- Broadcast-Standard Monitoring Delivered in Browser: Canvas API waveform and vectorscope overlays now deliver broadcast-standard signal visualization directly in the browser tab, eliminating the need for dedicated monitoring hardware at operator positions.
- Remote and Multi-Venue Production Unlocked: Any operator with a standard Linux server and internet connection can now run full color correction and monitoring workflows, enabling remote and multi-venue production without the logistics of shipping and setting up physical hardware.
Data Flow Diagram
Client Testimonial
“Seeing broadcast-grade colour correction and waveform monitoring delivered entirely in a browser tab on a standard server was a genuine proof point for our software-defined production roadmap.”
– VP Broadcast Technology, Media & Entertainment
Conclusion
Real-time broadcast color correction on this platform used to require $50,000+ hardware ProcAmp units with mandatory on-site deployment, making remote and multi-venue scaling economically impractical. Ksolves delivered an open-stack solution using SRT, FFmpeg, WebRTC, and Vue.js that achieves sub-500ms glass-to-glass color correction with browser-based waveform and vectorscope monitoring on commodity Linux hardware.
Per-seat cost dropped by more than 90% against hardware; broadcast-standard monitoring now runs entirely in a browser tab, and remote deployment is possible with zero additional hardware. The solution validates the commercial viability of software-defined broadcast tooling for media companies migrating production workflows to open-stack infrastructure.
The same architecture is directly extensible to multi-input color matching, AI-driven automatic color grade suggestions, and fully cloud-native live production pipelines as the next phase of this work.
