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Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ

This page contains answers to frequently asked questions. Please try to find the answer to your question here before contacting support.

Contents:

How do I contact tech support?

Technical support is offered through our ticket tracking system and through email correspondence with our support team. Please provide detailed information about the that issue you are experiencing and steps to reproduce it. To help us troubleshoot the problem, include the following information: the time when the problem occurred, the name of the stream, and any relevant screenshots. We also require that you use the Support page in Flussonic UI to send our team your server's log and configuration files when putting in a support request. After you have uploaded the debug info, the system will give you an upload UUID. Please include the upload UUID in your support ticket.

A more detailed article about the troubleshooting process can be found here.

Can I run other server software along with Flussonic Media Server?

We do not recommend running any third-party software on a system that hosts Flussonic. Flussonic Media Server is a resource-intensive process, and we cannot guarantee that it will perform well when running alongside other software.

Consult our OS tuning recommendations to learn more about configuring your server.

When you contact tech support, we might ask you to disable services that might be interfering with Flussonic Media Server. (E.g., HTTP servers such as apache2/nginx, and other video servers).

Can I run Flussonic on a 32-bit system?

You can only install and run Flussonic on 64-bit operating systems and CPUs.

How to set up adaptive streaming?

Flussonic provides an easy way to set up adaptive streaming. To do this, you need to enable the transcoder and specify several bitrates for video. Usually 2-3 "profiles" would be enough: low, medium and high.

For example, if you have an HD TV channel with a resolution of 1080p, set up the transcoder as follows:

Adaptive bitrate

This configuration will produce a stream with 3 video profiles: the original stream (of 1080p), one of 720p, and one of 480p. And also a 128 kbps audio track.

Flussonic Media Server will automatically generate adaptive bitrate streams for the HLS and DASH. All you need is to play the streams. Refer to Adding Video to Websites to learn how to play a stream.

Learn more about configuring the transcoder.

What kind of hardware best suits my needs?

The amount of load on the server depends heavily on the transcoding settings you select, how much you use the DVR archive, and the amount of traffic you receive. We cannot recommend a good hardware configuration for every situation — consider your circumstances when selecting your server's components.

What types of disks should I use for the archive? How much disk space is required?

To calculate the disk space required to store your archived video, multiply the total bitrate of the streams that are being archived by the period of time that you will keep the archived data.

Consider this example: you have 30 cameras with an average bitrate of 2.8 Mbps. You need to keep your archived data for 30 days. The 30 cameras will have a total bitrate of 84 megabits/second (the total bitrate is available in Flussonic’s web interface), which is equal to 10.5 megabytes/s (8 Mbit = 1 MB). Let’s first calculate how much space you will need to store 1 hour of recording: just multiply 10.5MB by 3600 seconds, and the result is 37,800MB (~ 37 GB) The rest is simple, since we know how many hours are there in a day:

  • 1 hour — 37GB
  • 1 day (24h) — 888GB
  • 30 days — 26,640GB (27TB)

A stream's bitrate may fluctuate and sometimes data is not saved (for example, if cameras are not online). However, we recommend that you purchase a data storage solution with 5-10% more space than what is required to store the maximum amount of data that should be recorded to your archive.

Flussonic Media Server can cache "hot," frequently accessed content to an SSD drive, so the performance of your mass storage disks may not be an. Read more about setting up the archive feature in this article.

If you expect to be using the archive exceptionally heavily, please consult with your hardware vendor and our support team.

How do I use the Stalker middleware with Flussonic Media Server?

In the Flussonic configuration, specify the address of the Stalker server. While configuring channels in the Stalker middleware, select «Flussonic» in the "Temporary links" and "TV archive" tabs.

Refer to this article in our Knowledge Base about setting up the Stalker middleware.

How do I troubleshoot audio issues in IP camera streams?

Most IP cameras only stream audio in the PCMA/PCMU codecs. (Also known as G.711a and G.711u.)

Only RTMP supports these audio codecs. To transmit sound from IP camera sources over other protocols, you must turn on IP camera sound transcoding.

There is a guide in this article.

How do I build a high-load system?

There is a number of ways to spread the load between servers in a cluster, and each approach has its pros and cons.

  • Using DNS round robin. Clients will reach the servers by rotation, regardless of server load.
  • Using Geo DNS. This approach is useful if you have lots of clients from different countries and need users to be directed to regional servers.
  • Balancing via Middleware. Your website/portal can generate links to different servers, with/without regards to server load and GeoIP.
  • Having the client choose. In this approach, a client receives a list of all servers and selects the most suitable one based on certain parameters (distance, load, accessibility).
  • Using a special balancing solution. This could be a third party tool which is transparent for clients and Middleware.

Using its HTTP API Flussonic Media Server provides load balancing solutions with the information needed to perform their tasks.

There is an article on load balancing in our Knowledge Base.

Why has my trial ended prematurely?

If your trial has ended before you have had the chance to conclude your evaluation of our software, please reach out to our customer support team for assistance. Include a description of your project, and a list of features you would like to try.

How many streams can be transcoded on a single video card?

Nvidia's consumer-grade GeForce video cards have a limitation on the number of streams they can encode at the same time: in most cases, there is a limit of two encoding jobs per card. GPUs in Nvidia's QUADRO and TESLA product lines do not have this restriction. Note that the maximum number of streams that a card can transcode simultaneously depends on many factors, including the parameters of the input and output streams (codec, bitrate, video resolution, frames per second, etc.), as well as the hardware resources of the server.

Use Nvidia's GPU comparison table to select the appropriate GPU hardware for your project.

Can I configure CORS in Flussonic?

Flussonic includes CORS header to all HTTP responses. Almost in any case you do not need to configure CORS in Flussonic because default settings are enough: cross-origin is allowed for all domains (Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *). If you encounter a problem with CORS, check settings of the nodes between Flussonic and a viewer, for example a CDN or a streaming platform.

Do not use CORS for authorization. You will need the auth backend for that.

If you need to use CORS for protection against embedding video players on other websites, please refer to CORS for player protection