This section talks about how to organise the servers needed for VideoLAN in order to stream on a Local Area Network (LAN), or a Wide Area Network (WAN). These are not precise technical procedures but suggestions taken from our own experience.
You can have as many VideoLAN Servers (vls
) on your network as you
want. vlms
should only be used for testing purposes. You may want to
specialise your VideoLAN Servers. For example, on our campus, we have
three VideoLAN servers located in three different places :
If you want to stream multiple DVDs (we suppose that you have the legal
right to do so) from the same machine, you may want to have big disk
drives instead of multiple DVD drives. You can copy the DVDs on the
hard drives and tell vls
to read from the hard drive instead of the DVD
drive.
If you want to stream satellite channels (we again suppose that you have the legal right to do so), you need a satellite card for every transponder. On one transponder, you have up to around 10 channels. If you want to stream 5 channels that are on 3 different transponders, you will need 3 satellite cards inside the machine. We don't care if those 3 transponders are on 3 different satellites, that's your problem ! A satellite stream is around 4 Mbit/s. You will then stream 5 x 4 = 20 Mbit/s : a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet connection will be needed. If you have want to stream channels from more transponders that PCI slot available in the machine... you will need to find a second computer !
If you want to do Video On Demand with a lot of potential clients, you may want to set up a server specialized for VOD. This server would have very fast disk access and be located in a technical room with a fast network connection available. For example, you could set up a SAN with disk drives connected in fibre channel and multiple 100 Mbit/s Ethernet connections or a Gigabit connection to the network.
If your network supports multicast, you will have to install a
miniVLCS
in order to enable the clients to easily go from a
channel to another. This program doesn't need much resources in term of
computer power or network connection. Therefore, you can install it on a
old machine running Linux, or on one of your VideoLAN Servers.
Multicast allows you to stream a video to multiple machines on a Wide Area Network (WAN). The network hardware of the WAN will need to have a full multicast support. If it doesn't, you can link multicast islands from one to another through IP tunnels. This is how the MBone (a Multicast Backbone on the Internet) works.
With the VLANs solution, you will only be able to stream on a LAN where
all the switches support VLANs. You will not be able to stream on a WAN.
With this solution, we advise you to have a Linux machine dedicated to
hosting the mini VLAN server
. This machine is critical in term
of security because it will have in it's configuration files the MIBs of
all the switches of you LAN.
If your router is a bad router (i.e. you can't configure it so as to
let the different VLANs communicate but without letting the streams
broadcasted by vls
in a VLAN go to the other VLANs), you may want
to set up a VLANbridge or buy a new router. If you want to set up a
VLANbridge and you have an Ethernet network, you need to have a Linux
machine with as many network cards as VLANs used. This machine will be
located in a place where you have a switch with as many ports available
as VLANs used. You will plug each network card to a port in each VLAN
used, and your VLANbridge will enable the different VLANs to communicate
but without letting the video streams go from a VLAN to another. If you
want to set up a VLANbridge and you have an ATM backbone (like on our
old network), the VLANbridge machine only needs one ATM card connected
to the ATM backbone : this card will enable the VLANbridge to have an
interface in every VLAN.
Закладки на сайте Проследить за страницей |
Created 1996-2024 by Maxim Chirkov Добавить, Поддержать, Вебмастеру |