Live channels are often carried as transport stream over UDP or RTP multicast. Often such a stream must be handed over to a 3rd party for further processing or distribution, via a dedicated L2 Ethernet link. In practice, to ensure network isolation, this requires copying the multicast stream between two VLANs (with optional processing), an operation performed by expensive and proprietary hardware equipments such as DCMs. This presentation will explore the options using standard PCs and OSS such as DVBlast. For even better isolation, the speaker will also explore software virtualization using Linux/KVM and the SR-IOV feature of some network cards. The use of these technologies with multicast has proven difficult, as this case study will show.
Speakers: Christophe Massiot