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Mcaster

Mcaster is the Flussonic headend. The signal reaches it from a satellite receiver, from a neighbouring network, from a partner or from your own playout; Mcaster brings it to the shape the delivery network accepts and carries it to the destination — into the multicast of a cable network, to a modulator, to another city over SRT, to a standby site.

The key difference from Catena: Catena ends at the viewer, Mcaster ends at the handover point. There is a viewer beyond it, but that viewer is not the headend's customer. Hence what this manual is about: a transport stream with its own PSI/SI, a constant bitrate, transport counters and proof of delivery per destination.

What you can run

  • Reception from satellite and from someone else's network. A program is picked out of an MPTS trunk, and the trunk itself is received once no matter how many programs you take from it.
  • Transport between sites. SRT across the open internet with encryption and loss recovery; UDP/RTP inside your own network.
  • Signal preparation for the receiver. Own PNR, PIDs and SDT per destination; a constant bitrate for the modulator; teletext and subtitles that survive to the output.
  • Proven delivery. Per destination: status with a named failure reason, rate, bytes, reconnects, retransmits.
  • An archive on site. Recording right on the headend — for the day someone asks what exactly you sent out at 03:40.

The full list is on the Functional characteristics page.

How it is built

Mcaster is an interface and a licence on top of the Sapsan streaming engine; the build is the same one. Three practical consequences follow.

  • Everything is configured from the central panel. Streams, machines, processing and delivery destinations live in one web interface; there is no need to edit files on the servers.
  • One process, one station. The minimal install is a single machine: engine, panel and API in one process.
  • Several machines, one interface. When there is more than one station, they attach to a control plane and the operator sees them in the same panel: stream placement across machines, a shared archive, shared statistics. An attached machine has no settings of its own — it receives them from the control plane.

A stream inside Mcaster is one service: it has inputs (primary and backup), processing and outputs. Everything described in this manual is a property of a stream.

Where to start