[streaming] Re: monitoring several simultaneous signals

[Marshall Eubanks]

Hello;

On Apr 14, 2007, at 4:38 AM, Jean-Paul Saman wrote:

> Anthony Benjammin DeNardo III wrote:
>> we are currently multicasting 5 channels (channel = mpeg stream)  
>> to our campus using VLC.  I am curious, is anyone else monitoring  
>> several streams at the same time?  I've tried with two pretty  
>> beefy computers (G5/1GB RAM, dualcore2GHz/1GB RAM) and neither  
>> seem to be able to keep up with decoding more than 3 or 4 streams  
>> at the same time :-(
>
> Obviously you need more computers (decoding system) for visually  
> monitoring all your multicast streams. The CPU and memory  
> requirements are dictated by the multicasts itself. If it are big  
> streams, then it requires a lot of CPU.
>

Monitoring for what purpose ? If you just want to see transport level  
stuff (is the stream up, are the packets well formed, is there
much jitter / loss, etc.), then rtpdump and rtpqual can do this  
without killing your CPU. If you want to check A/V sync or color  
balance,
one machine cycling through the channels should work fine. If you  
want to show a bunch of multiple Mbps HD streams on monitors to  
impress visitors, I would use 1 CPU per stream.

Note, BTW, that it is very hard to get humans to look at something  
for hours on end to spot very rare failures as part of their job.
Their brains will simply turn off. I would therefore include a  
prominent mechanism for audience feedback and monitor that as well.

Regards
Marshall


>> what I'm interested in, is creating a monitoring station, where we  
>> can check the integrity of each transmission at a glance.  so I  
>> envision that we will shortly scale our multicasting up to 16  
>> channels.  I would like to be able to watch something like a 2  
>> inch by 2inch window of each of the 16 channels.
>
> Or you could use one visuall monitoring system that browses through  
> all your streams every, eg: ~5 seconds.
>
>> can anyone recommend a system that might be able to handle this?    
>> or if you have other suggestions, I'm open :-)
>
> Or write a heartbeat/health monitor for the streaming VLC's. One of  
> the VideoLAN consultants/partners called M2X (www.m2x.nl) could do  
> that for you, if you are interested.
>
> Gtz,
> Jean-Paul Saman.
>
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