By Andrew Starks, Product Marketing Manager, Broadcast & ProAV Products

When I was a kid, my dad wore a stainless-steel Seiko on his left wrist almost every day of his life. I still remember running up to him and grabbing his arm just to look at it. I don’t think I could tell time by then, but the little window with strange words drew my interest. “SUN?” Maybe it told the weather. “SAT?” He was sitting, so that sort of made sense. “THU?” No idea.

Decades later, I found that same watch in a box I’d packed away. The case is worn smooth and it was heavier than it looked. When I waved it back and forth in my hand, it started ticking again. More than fifty years after it was made, it still works. No drama. No updates. No subscriptions. Just a simple, precise mechanism that quietly does what it was designed to do.

You don’t need to define quality when it’s in your hand. You just know.

Quality isn’t a single feature. It’s what happens when the fundamentals are correct. It emerges from architecture, from discipline, from sometimes saying “no,” and from an attention to detail that never gets rushed. It’s what remains when every shortcut has been declined and every part of a design has been made right.

That same belief in disciplined design is what defines the MEP100, Macnica’s ST 2110 100 GbE SmartNIC. Its sole purpose is to deliver professional media transport across the major compute platforms in use today.

Every aspect of ST 2110 transport - packetization, depacketization, seamless protection switching, packet pacing, and PTP timestamping - is handled entirely on the card. This clear separation of concerns defines the product: the MEP100 SmartNIC takes full responsibility for the precision and reliability of transport, while the host focuses on the application.

That same mindset carries through the included M2S SDK. Its API is straightforward, high-performance, and remarkably simple for what it accomplishes. M2S provides callback buffer access to frames or subframes, metadata, and network status without unnecessary complexity. It’s flat, modern, and respectful of the developer’s design, offering a clean interface that integrates naturally with existing code.

When the foundations are sound, performance doesn’t depend on where you deploy it. Whether it’s part of a Windows-based multiviewer, a macOS workstation for video processing, or a Linux control system driving a video wall, the MEP100 delivers the same precision and reliability.

Attention to detail runs through every part of the MEP100. Even the often-overlooked elements, like our GStreamer plugins, are built to production quality. They aren’t prototypes or placeholders. They’re finished, tested, and reliable because we hold everything to the same standard. Every component is complete only when it’s correct and can be counted on in the moments that matter.

Like my dad’s watch, the quality evident in the MEP100 comes from a chain of purposeful decisions, not something added after it was made. It works as intended. It feels right. And in that, there’s a quiet kind of beauty.

For developers building the next generation of high-performance ST 2110 systems in broadcast or Pro AV, that’s what the MEP100 offers: a foundation you can trust. The architecture is sound, the tools are refined, and the details are finished.

It just works, exactly the way quality should.

• 100 GbE ST 2110 SmartNIC
• Any combination of up to 8x8 UHD and 32x32 HD channels of video (limited by bandwidth)
• ST 2022-7 seamless protection switching
• Full hardware packetization / depacketization
• PTP hardware timestamping
• Supported OS: Windows, macOS, Linux
• Integrated M2S SDK and major media frameworks, including GStreamer and FFmpeg
• Available with JPEG-XS and ProRes support

Discover how the MEP100 SmartNIC can bring precision, reliability, and simplicity to your media transport.