What's New in Cinegy Route 22

In two years since our latest Cinegy Route release the product has been through a comprehensive review and overhaul to the point where it almost looks like a completely different product.

We started with moving the code base to 64-bit architecture to make it a perfect future-proof match with the modern CPUs and operating systems as well as seamless integration with other Cinegy products.

Our next move was supporting high DPI mode in user interface to ensure best scaling on modern UHD screens.

These changes sparked a bit of dissonance in us – a modern 64-bit UHD-fit product deserves a better look!

We sat down with the team and gathered a long list of usability improvements as well as designed a new style for the product that I am proud to present to you now.

I am going to accompany this post with before/after screenshots of the main parts of the Cinegy Route software package.

We shall start with Cinegy Route Browser – the utility that most of you will be familiar with due to its broad integration in Cinegy products.

The first thing that will catch your eye would be the modern user interface with a distinctive modern look.

But looks are not the only thing we’ve got to offer, there are quite a few functional and experience improvements too! We have added a "Mute" button for your sources as well as "Always on top" window mode that would allow using Cinegy Route Browser in more scenarios involving dozens of IP streams.

We deprecated the old "Show Player" checkbox and replaced it with an intuitive action on double-click, that collapses the preview player and expands the tree when required. The space freed up by removing the checkbox is now used to display the source title.

The biggest addition in the new release, though, is the use of NVIDIA GPUs to decode the feeds in the Cinegy Route player. This change is available in the preview player across all parts of Cinegy Route and described in more detail further down this post.

In other applications from the Cinegy Route package, we focused on improving usability and general user experience.

We took a thorough look into what was missing in terms of control elements, customization, and intuitive actions.

This brought many simple but valuable improvements, such as extending right-click menus for most items in Cinegy Route windows, enabling double-click actions for them.

We also improved the copy/paste operations and enabled the hotkeys common in Windows OS to make dealing with Cinegy Route even more efficient.

We made sure to pay extra attention to working with the IP address for the physical sources in Cinegy Route and found inspiration in a variety of commodity IT networking utilities to introduce an improved experience.

The new generation of Cinegy Route benefits from improved IP address field navigation with the use of arrow keys, backspace, and dot buttons. We also added an ability to paste IP addresses using Ctrl+V and copy them to the clipboard with Ctrl+C, as well as added the separate "Copy" button in the GUI.

Just like other applications from the package, GUI elements in Cinegy Route Control have been through some repositioning in a more ergonomic fashion to improve the visual focus on the actual stream and the virtual destination panel.

This application has also seen a revamp of the approaches to displaying the tabs and working with them, which makes it faster and more intuitive.

As we know, the devil is in the details, but these days, it’s hard to find someone easily impressed by simple UI/UX tune-ups. Therefore, I will let you discover the rest of them yourselves and move on to a more exciting part of the Cinegy Route v22 story…​

For us, one of the biggest news here is that Cinegy Route now offers even greater value by empowering your workflow with end-to-end SRT encryption. Yes, you’ve got it right – with this latest release, you have no limitations in using end-to-end 128/256-bit AES encryption to ensure that content is protected from contribution to distribution!

After the global pandemic catalyzed the inevitable move to remote production, SRT evolved from being a new promising protocol just a few years ago, much loved by us for its resilience and security, to becoming a backbone of transmission on an industry-wide scale.

SRT is most commonly compared to RTMP, a legacy protocol, which is still often used for video contribution. However, not only does SRT consistently outperform RTMP in terms of both latency and video quality, support for RTMP’s dated technology is dwindling.

According to Deloitte in its recent "Technology, Media and Telecommunications Predictions" insight:

Encrypted SRT streams are great for those of you, who need to receive/deliver your feeds via the Internet, and particularly for those, who root your infrastructure in the cloud, and Cinegy Route is here to help you with your SRT infrastructure.

One of the greater but less obvious improvements in the new release that might get overlooked is GPU acceleration for the Cinegy Route preview player.

The new release introduces utilizing your GPU to run your previews in the Cinegy Route player.

This means it doesn’t just make it faster but also offloads your CPU to use its capacity where it is needed more.

The Cinegy software had been benefiting from this technology starting from the v11 generation. Started in Cinegy Air, with years we’ve been only improving it and gradually introduced it in Cinegy Multiviewer, Cinegy Capture, Cinegy Convert, Cinegy Title, and Cinegy Desktop; and now the time has come for Cinegy Route.

Apart from general performance optimization, this technology automatically brings in another feature – HEVC streams playback, which used to be a limitation before.

Yes, you got it right from the title, this is exactly what you thought – we brought secondary events style third-party equipment integration to Cinegy Route!

The approach you may be familiar with from Cinegy Air and Cinegy Capture PRO is now available for you in one more Cinegy product.

Using the Cinegy Event Manager integration, Virtual Destinations in Cinegy Route now enable even more complex workflows and amplify the agility of the product.

You may set up secondary commands on switch source action and enable integration with other elements of your Cinegy ecosystem, like Cinegy Stream Switcher or remote instance of Cinegy Route.

Using this feature, you may also interface with devices from the list below to mirror your routing commands on an IRD or SDI router from the wide variety of built-in plug-ins offered free of charge in Cinegy Event Manager.

Failed to find a plug-in you need in the list? – You can integrate your third-party unit using the Cinegy Powershell Command interface that runs Powershell scripts for you, send a contact opening/closure command to a GPI/O card or even design your own Cinegy Event Manager plug-in for your preferred vendor, using the specs we kindly published for you on Cinegy Open.

Don’t have an in-house development department or need consultancy or training on any of those scenarios?! – Reach out to us in Cinegy Professional Services and we will find the best way to get you on rails with your integration in the most suitable manner.

Thanks for sparing your time to read this today and for your continued belief in what we are doing!