General AVB FAQ

1   What is this website for?

See About avb.statusbar.com.

2   What is AVB?

Audio Video Bridging is a term for a collection of IEEE Standards for time sensitive networking which facilitates the transport of high performance audio and video on a LAN.

For details of the standards involved, see the AVB Developer FAQ.

3   What are the minimum requirements for an AVB switch?

An AVB Switch is required to support:

• IEEE Std. 802.1Q-2011 FQTSS and SRP.
• IEEE Std. 802.1AS-2011 gPTP on each AVB enabled ethernet port

AVnu Compliance is important for a switch to have in order to ensure correct operation of your AVB network.

4   How many channels of audio can you have on a network link with AVB?

The answer to this question depends on:

• The bandwidth of the network link (100baseT or gigabit Ethernet)
• The channels per stream
• The format of the audio media
• The count of streams

Use the tools to calculate arbitrary combinations.

For the very detailed explanations of the contents of an AVB Audio Ethernet frame, see the Maximum AVB Channel Counts presentation.

Common examples:

5   How many AVB streams of audio can you have on an entire network?

The maximum number of streams on an AVB network depends on the streams properties.

• If the streams properties are not packable, there can be 318 streams on a network - each with 1 or more channels of audio.
• If each talker device provides streams with stream properties that are packable, there can be 318 talkers on a network each with as many streams as they can fit on their links.
• If all the stream properties across the entire network are packable, there can be much more than 318 talkers on a network.

6   Are all the standards involved in AVB complete?

Yes, with the completion of IEEE Std 1722.1-2013 in August, 2013 all of the standards required for a full complete end user experience are completed, ratified, published, and available for download or purchase.