We use Surveillance Station at a lot of clients but am running into an issue at a client with 25+ cameras and multiple users streaming feeds, causing issue with laggy video feeds. We are upgrading the NAS to a more powerful unit, but am also looking to use Multicast to try and help with the amount of feeds being sent out from the NAS.
My understanding is we would want to use this so we can do a “one to many” and cut down on the amount of traffic the NAS itself is feeding to viewers. However, I can’t seem to find much detailed walkthru’s online. Anyone used this and can clarify things a bit for me?
You will probably also want to enable IGMP Snooping and one IGMP Snooping Querier. The Snooping only sends multicast to those clients subscribed, and the Querier handles the subscriptions. Exactly how to handle this with your tools, not really sure, especially since this requires a fairly newer version of IGMP Snooping.
This is a big part of things like NDI video and Dante audio/video due to the limited bandwidth each device can send. In Unicast, every client requires a new stream. This is most likely what is happening with your cameras getting laggy. Dante calls this a “Flow” and some devices are only capable of 2 Flows so multicast becomes a necessity.
If you don’t have the ability to set up a modern IGMP Snooping and Querier, then all multicast packets get sent to all clients causing extra noise that the NIC needs to throw away. Not exactly a broadcast storm, but not exactly a wonderful situation on a big network.
This network is all Unifi switches so we can enable IGMP Snooping.
Just so I know I’m understanding this correctly, the Multicast addon is for this specific setup where I have 5-8 different people all trying to view the cam feeds via the Synology Station app client, to try and take the load off the NAS of trying to push that many feeds at once?
The setup itself seems easy. Install the Multicast package on Synology, then enable multicast in the settings and turn on multicast on each IP camera. Anything else I need to do?
That’s the gist of it, but I can’t help further because I don’t own any of that gear. I’m in Mikrotik and Extreme switching gear and I’m specifically involved with NDI and Dante with a Tricaster production system and moving audio for our music recording classes (and still not really there yet, waiting for the switches).