Video Bridge - MCS

Owned by Ramya Raman (Unlicensed)
Last updated: 31 minutes ago by Nir Cang
4 min read

The new video bridge is designed to efficiently share souces between multiple instances of MCM - may they be physical, on a VM or in the cloud.
It works on any type of stream supported by the TAG system and requires MCS controller, as it is the brain that identifies whenever a source is requested to be displayed on another MCM than the one that’s probing it and dynmaically creates the temporary bridge channel to transfer the stream, and then shutes it down when the stream is no longer displayed on the remote MCM.


There are a few modes in which the bridge works, based on the scenario:
1. If both MCMs are installed on a VM or physical server then it will work in a “TCP mode” which means that the source will be compressed and wrapped in TAG’s propietary compression and sent to the remote MCM.
2. If at least one of the MCMs involved in the bridge transfer are installed on cloud the system will automatically recognize that and wrap the compressed stream in SRT, to share it more efficiently and securely.
3. if the source that needs to be sent over the bridge is in “light” or “extra light” monitoring mode then there will be no decoding and compressing of the stream, it will be sent “as is”.

The bitrate of the re-encoded bridge channel (in scenario 1 and 2 mentioned above) will be affected only by the following parameters:
1. SOURCE frame rate

2. TARGET tile size, meaning the size of the tile in the remote mosaic where the source needs to be displayed.

  1. Amount of movement in the video frames, as with any compressed stream.

Important notes:

  • Source type, bitrate and resolution have no affect on the bridge channel bitrate, meaning, if you’re transfering a low quality compressed stream through the bridge it’s very likely that the bridge channel bitrate will be higher than the source, since the compresseion we’re using has lower compression ratio then MPEG2, H264 and especcialy H265, but it is much faster then any of those other codecs to maintain lowest latency possible.

  • The bridge channel’s maximum resolution is 1920X1080, so the bitrate will be identical if you’re trying to display it on a full screen HD output, full screen UHD or 1/4 UHD.

  • The bridge channel will consume up to 5 points from the server generating the mosaic, not the one generating the bridge channel.

Here’s an estimation of the bridge bitrate based on the source frame rate and target tile size, these numbers are flactuating by about 20%.

image-20241129-091845.png

** The new bridge on MCM9000 is available from version 6.0 onwards.

How to configure the bridge on MCS

 

In this example, two MCM nodes are configured on MCS for a video bridge. Physical MCM 1 will be the one generating the mosaic on which we plan to display the source and Physical MCM 2 is the one who will be probing the source.

 

  1. On the MCS navigate to Devices Management page. Please ensure atleast two MCM9000 devices are configured on the MCS. Please refer to Adding MCM9000 devices to MCS to configure MCM9000 devices, make sure they’re both running the same version.

    image-20241129-093629.png

     

  2. Ensure that the Video Bridge is enabled for the right NIC in the interface configuration:
    Go to “interface configuration” tab, double click on the interface through which you want the bridge traffic to be transferred, and check the “bridge” box.
    It can be any type of NIC supported by TAG.
    You can have up to two NICS per MCM with bridge enabled, in case one fails at will automatically switch to the other one.
    NOTE: network names of the NICS used for the bridge traffic MUST BE IDENTICAL.

image-20241129-092437.png

 

  1. Please refer to Add sources to through MCS to add Sources and Configure Output Encoder on MCS to configure the Output Encoder.

  2. Navigate to Sources Configuration and monitor some sources on Physical MCM 2

    image-20241129-093948.png

  3. Go to “layouts” tab, or use operator console in, order to assign these sources to a layout.

    image-20241129-094123.png

  4. Navigate to Output Configuration and activate an output on Physical MCM 1.

    image-20241129-094155.png

  5. In the output’s “layout” tab (or using the operator console) assign that layout to the output generatd by Physical MCM 1.

    image-20241129-094300.png

  6. Open the preview sceen of the outputs and see the bridged source are active

image-20241129-095411.png

  1. The only place where you can see the Bridge channel created is on the MCM “source configuration” tab.

image-20241129-094353.png