Functional characteristics¶

The list of Mcaster headend functions. Every function is described on a page of this manual, linked next to it.

Signal ingest¶

MPEG-TS over UDP — unicast and multicast, IPv4 and IPv6, with group subscription and source selection (SSM) — more.
Program selection from an MPTS trunk by number (program=); the trunk is received once for all its programs, no matter how many streams parse it — more.
MPEG-TS over HTTP, including chunked transfer; a broken connection and a silent source are told apart — more.
SRT ingest: a dedicated port per stream, AES encryption, streamid, a tunable loss recovery budget — more.
RTMP and HLS ingest — for sources arriving from the OTT world.
Input codecs: H264, HEVC, MPEG-2 video; AAC, AC3, EAC3, MPEG-2 audio; DVB teletext, DVB subtitles, CEA-608/708 captions, KLV metadata, SCTE-35 markers.
Input redundancy: several sources per stream, automatic switching on source health, return to the primary after a clean window — more.
Causal detail of input errors and highlighting of the minutes with no signal — more.

Outgoing transport stream assembly: PAT/PMT/SDT, program number, explicit track PIDs, service and provider names, transport_stream_id and original_network_id — more.
Own service tables per destination: the same signal goes to different receivers under different PNRs and PIDs, without a second multiplexer — more.
Constant bitrate (CBR) with null-packet stuffing, drift-free PCR and decoder buffer model (HRD) accounting — more.
Transcoding: H264, HEVC, AV1 video, AAC and Opus audio, deinterlacing, scaling, GOP control — more.
Teletext and captions: pass-through to the output as they came, extraction into a text track, or both representations at once — more.

Sending to the network over UDP: multicast and unicast, TTL control, outgoing interface and bind address selection — more.
RTP encapsulation per RFC 2250 / SMPTE ST 2022-2 — the same output, the rtp:// scheme — more.
Sending over SRT to a fixed destination with encryption and streamid; SRT serving from the stream's own port — more.
Sending over RTMP to platforms and CDNs, including HEVC and AV1 (enhanced RTMP) — more.
Several destinations per stream at once; destinations with identical settings share one byte-identical stream — more.
Automatic revival of a dead destination with no manual action — more.
An OTT copy of the signal: HLS, LL-HLS and DASH from the same station — more.
Encryption of the OTT copy: Common Encryption cbcs for HLS and DASH, the key from the settings or from your server over SPEKE, signalling for Widevine, PlayReady, FairPlay and ClearKey; pushes go out in the clear — more.

Recording into an append-only storage across several disks, retention by depth and by size — more.
Archive playback by absolute time, rewind, seamless join with live, JPEG previews — more.

Per-PID transport counters: continuity counter violations, TEI, scrambled packets, PSI CRC errors, broken PES, PCR jitter against the standard's thresholds, decoder buffer underruns — more.
Per-destination delivery counters: status with a reason, rate, bytes, errors, reconnects, retransmits — more.
Causal detail of input errors: media defects and source failures are separated, every cause is its own line on the chart — more.
A built-in Prometheus server as a ready Grafana datasource, a scrape endpoint for your own TSDB, telemetry into the Retroview cloud monitoring — more.

A central panel: streams, machines, placement, archive and sessions in one web interface.
Edits are applied on the fly, without interrupting the broadcast.
One panel for the whole cluster: an attached machine receives its settings from the control plane.
A management API for integration with third-party provisioning systems.
A structured rejection of an invalid setting: 422 with the offending field named, not a silent distortion of the configuration.