SVSi N-Series Pre-implementation - Manual (Page 10)

10 Networked AV Pre-Implementation Guide www.svsiav.com
3.2.1 Network Diagnostic Utilities
SVSi offers free network utilities to facilitate this deployment. Go to Support > Resources > NTools on the
http://svsiav.com/ website to download the following diagnostic tools:
• Wireshark® – With an SVSi plug-in for extracting packet information from our Networked AV devices, this utility
captures network packets to show source, destination, and payload. All multicast and broadcast packets will be
captured and decoded. Wireshark does not require the host to have a compatible IP address.
• Viewer software – This software runs on a host and automatically detects all Networked AV streams to allow
selection from a drop-down list. Once selected, the video and audio streams are sampled directly from the
network and played in a confidence window. This will allow encoder diagnostics in the event that video does not
display. If Viewer shows the video and audio as good, the encoder is working and the decoder or network
downstream of Viewer host is suspect. Viewer does not require the host to have a compatible IP address.
• Networked AV Ping Test – This Excel macro discovers devices on the video network and displays properties in
a table. The host PC will need a compatible IP address in the same subnet as the Networked AV devices.
• N-Able software – Available for PC or Mac, this software provides a matrix presentation of all Networked AV
devices color-coded to indicate status. Red columns or rows indicate decoders or encoders, respectively, are
non-communicative. Red text in a column indicates that a video source is not connected. Red text in a row
indicates that a decoder’s display is not connected or not powered on.
• VLC – Available for PC or Mac, this open-source software is a portable, media player and streaming media
server (written by the VideoLAN project). Use it to view N3000 series streams on your desktop (e.g., UDP, RTP,
RTSP and HTTP protocols). Download for free at
http://www.videolan.org/index.html .
3.3 Installation Over a Dedicated Network
Whenever possible, SVSi recommends a dedicated layer-3 network for transmitting video. We offer the Cisco SG300- and
SG500- lines of pre-configured switches for resale to our partners. These switches are shipped pre-configured for
Networked AV from the factory. Any network switch should have a backplane capacity of at least (2 x 1000-Mbps x N)
where N is the number of ports on the switch passing the video traffic. For example, a 24-port switch where all available
ports may be used to pass video traffic should have a (2 x 1000 x 24) = 48-Gbps backplane. A single channel of N1000
video and up to ten channels of N2000 video can be sent or received from each port in this switch example although full
bandwidth may not be used at any one time. Depending on N3000 encoder bandwidth settings, over 100 channels can be
sent through one gigabit Ethernet port.
It is possible to overwhelm a single switch port using IGMP when more than ten N2000s or one N1000 decoders on the port
request different video streams. When this happens, all video streams on the port will drop significant numbers of frames
and appear jerky or cease to display video at all. This situation cannot be managed through the network except by reducing
the bit-rates for all video streams where possible. Avoidance of more than a gigabit of traffic per wire during installation is
the preferred method to prevent this occurrence.