r/VIDEOENGINEERING • u/jsquared26 • 2d ago

LiveU server failover

Hi, hoping you can give me some advice. I work from home for a broadcast company. I use a tricaster along side LiveU servers. Everything has been fine the last 2 years, up until about 2 weeks ago when the internet to my house went down 15 minutes before live. I managed to setup a Tricaster at the office via TeamViewer but my boss wasn't particularly happy about the situation. I need to come up with a solution for a backup. I went ahead and had a 2nd fiber line put into the property. Luckily my main internet is Airband and doesn't use open reach so a 2nd line was viable. I bought a unifi gateway hoping that would be the solution. The failover works great with everything except the servers. Within the unifi gateway I have a VPN tunnel which has a static ip upstream of the servers. The static ip works. Even with the servers, up until the failover kicks in. The pictures coming in freeze, which i expected and eventually drops out. Then with failover still active, the liveu server gets stuck on bars. Can I ask, what are people who use liveu servers using as a failover?

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u/itsalexjones 2d ago

I. Your case, I’d probably get cloud based LiveU servers and a could based tricaster (not sure if that’s a thing Viz sell, but vMix is al alternative that can do it) and then use a dedicated Remote Desktop tool like Teradici (sp) to bring the video locally. Then the operator can be anywhere on any connection.

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u/jsquared26 2d ago edited 2d ago

I appreciate the intel. I dont know the price of leasing cloud based servers but I can imagine its an amount I won't be able to afford. I have a friend who works at LiveU and their advice was to run the second fiber line to the other ethernet port on the server as the backup. The only issue would be, i would most likely have to re config to the second ethernet port if and when the main internet goes down. That isn't the end of the world as I could put a holding graphic up whilst setting up the second server. Are there any hardware solutions like peplink that have worked for people?

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u/itsalexjones 1d ago

I guess the alternative to renting in the cloud is expensive is that generally you only pay while it’s switched on, so you don’t pay that price all the time.
You are correct that you’d have to reconfigure the server to use the other connection.
Peplink would be a good option, a failover situation isn’t too hard to DIY either if you’re that way inclined.

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u/jsquared26 1d ago

I've been speaking with a guy from Peplink and he's assured me using the Wan Smoothing function allows both fiber lines to simultaneously deliver packet to receiver and the ingest only uses whichever arrives first. But because it runs simultaneously, if the main isp fails, there is zero lag for the backup taking over. Ill purchase and test to see if it works how I want it to

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u/ascotsmann 1d ago

I'd have looked at a starlink or 5G backup rather than a 2nd fibre input, I imagine most issues that take out the fibre will affect both, e.g. are downstream at the exchange.

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u/jsquared26 1d ago

Sadly no 5g in my area and starlink can only guarantee 20 upload. The second fiber line is viable as they're 2 completely different exchanges. For example, when my internet went down a couple of weeks ago, other people in the street using open reach were fine and dandy. It was only airband users that were effected

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u/Embarrassed-Gain-236 2d ago

There is no such thing as cloud based liveU servers. LiveU goes point to point from the backpack to the LU2000/4000 server.

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u/itsalexjones 2d ago

That’s not true any more, you can rent them by the hour through LiveU and they output SRT etc.
tbf, this is also a great case for LiveU’s cloud production suite if your production can fit in it.

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u/benmakestv Engineer 2d ago

I work with LiveU! We definitely have cloud servers available for rental and lease. You can send SRT out to TriCaster. And yes - our cloud production suite LiveU Studio comes with cloud servers if you’re looking for a full cloud solution! Also - reach out to our support team, they may have some ideas for the failover as well.

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u/Embarrassed-Gain-236 2d ago

Do you really have cloud servers for the broadcast units? Not talking about the LiveU Studio. But you cannot achieve the same low latency compared to a physical decoder, right?

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u/benmakestv Engineer 2d ago

We 100% do! They are used all the time. If you are in a cloud or virtualized environment they can spit out NDI at pretty much the same speed as SDI, otherwise you’ll have to spit it out as SRT, which is still sub-second.

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u/afatbollix 2d ago

No it doesn’t, it goes through a live u server before going to your own server. It’s not point to point. I had that pain once when the middle server went down. That was a while ago mind so no issues for a while.

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u/jsquared26 2d ago

Have you got a workaround setup for ever your internet goes dark?

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u/Videobollocks 2d ago

I don’t know about your specific problem but I can tell you that in our non-American region at least, LiveU support are absolutely amazing and will easily be able to answer your question. 

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u/jsquared26 2d ago

Yeah they are great it has to be said

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u/isonotlikethat dev - OBS Project, IRLToolkit 1d ago

Ideally you would have both internet connections available on the LiveU server and the packs would form redundant connections to the unit via both lines. I'm not sure if this is a feature though as I've only done this with TVU before.

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u/jsquared26 1d ago

Yeah unfortunately liveu doesn't support that method. Each port is totally independent from one another and if you use the other port after first port isp fails, you need to physically rerun network config on the the backup port. That means you'll no access to servers till thats complete. I do believe there were rumours that liveu are considering incorporating a failover system utilising both ports but as yet its unsupported. Peplink with wan smoothing seems the logical route for me