12.4. Caller-connection redundancy

Our customers are often faced with the task of connecting to a media provider in Caller-mode, receiving the SRT signal and transmitting it to the SDI.

For this task, our SRTMiniServer provides a convenient Caller feature that allows customers to:

Connect to partner media servers in Caller mode
Receive SRT signal
Output it to SDI in the required format (Progressive or Interlace)

What's the problem?

Unfortunately, our clients have experienced instances of failure at the ISP.

And if your media provider is most likely hosted on powerful servers (e.g. Amazon Cloud), then last-mile problems - on the client side - are very real.

Imagine: you receive a signal through the SRTMiniServer, convert it, and broadcast it. A sudden internet connection failure occurs – and your broadcast is interrupted!

Solution

To prevent this from happening, we have added a signal redundancy feature.

Now SRTMiniServer (2.4.9+) can receive the same stream over multiple links. Connect two or three ISPs and forget about problems with the broadcast due to dropped links! Yes, it will require additional resources, but it will guarantee uninterrupted operation and save your nerves.

How to

You need to connect several ISPs to your PC and take advantage of the fact that in Caller mode you can specify which network interface to connect to.

Then create as many connections to the media provider as you have ISPs.

To view the available network interfaces on the PC, use the command ipconfig.exe

ipconfig output

In our example the PC has two network interfaces with addresses 192.168.1.250 and 192.168.1.251.

After that you need to create a Caller connection where after the server address in brackets specify the IP of the required interface.

Similarly, you need to create a second Caller-connection, but in brackets specify the second interface, in our example it will be 192.168.1.251.

So our server will then receive the signal from the media server in two ways through different ISPs.

The last step is to configure the SDI lines to automatically switch to the backup line if the signal through the first provider fails (see here)