CCTV & Multicasting

[demazter]

Hello,

We have around 176 cameras spread across site, all on a single VLAN.

It's unusual for more than one operator to be accessing the camera feeds at any one time and they are all viewed by our CCTV software client, which is Genetec.

We are experiencing quite a bit of tearing on the video feed and dropped packets.  This is according to the CCTV client.

I don't know enough about the CCTV software to understand why this might be happening but the support company is saying that we need to enable Multicast for the CCTV VLAN/Cameras.

My understanding of multicast in this situation is that it's only really required if more than one operator is accessing the same feed.

Does anyone have any experience of this that can help?

The VLAN should support multicast but in doing so do I risk performance on other VLAN's if I don't enable multicast routing?

Finally, is there something special I need to do for the VLAN/Ports to enable multicast or is it enabled and useable "out of the box"?

[Bruce]

Hi @demazter, to enable multicast on a VLAN you need either to enable Multicast routing (PIM) on a full Layer 3 switch, or you need to enable an IGMP Snooping Querier for the VLAN (you can do this on some of the Layer 2 switches). Here is some more information, https://documentation.meraki.com/MS/Layer_3_Switching/MS_Multicast_Routing_Overview. 

I can’t be sure exactly why you’re being told you need multicast, but keep in mind that if you are recording every camera - since it’s not a Meraki MV solution - there will be a video stream from every camera to the recorder (DVR). With 176 cameras that may be a fair amount of traffic, even before you account for operators viewing the streams.

[cmr]

@demazter we have ~1000 cameras running over a mixture of Meraki and Cisco infrastructure with most being remotely live viewed over a multi-link Meraki SD-WAN. However we are using MileStone XProtect, but the concept should be similar.

• What type of cameras are they, IP or analogue?
• What quality settings do you have and how much bandwidth does each stream use?
• Does playback work okay?
• What are the traffic levels on the recording servers and encoders?
• Is anything else in that VLAN? - we keep IP camera to recorder and encoder to recorder in one dedicated VLAN at each site.