Multicast Streaming

Multicast streaming is important if you need to distribute video streams to a large amount of monitors. A camera or recorder can only support a finite amount of unicast streams and there may be heavy performance reprecussions for exceeding these limitations. It is recommended to use multicast in these situations.

Prerequisites

• A computer on the same network as the device we're trying to multicast

Setup

1. Ensure you have network connectivity to the device you're trying to enable multicast on. You can do this by either typing the IP address into a browser or by pinging it from a command line.
2. Type the following command into the browser by replacing the <ip_address> placeholder with your IP address. 
   1. http://<ip_address>/cgi-bin/configManager.cgi?action=setConfig&Multicast.RTP[0].Enable=true&Multicast.RTP[1].Enable=true
3. The above step should respond with a message that simply states OK. See the below screenshot for an example.
   
   
   
   
4. The next command will show you if RTP was successfully enabled. You will need to scroll down quite some ways so it may be beneficial to press CTRL+F and search for RTP[0]. Again, you will need to replace the placeholder IP address with the IP address of the device.
   1. http://<ip_address>/cgi-bin/configManager.cgi?action=getConfig&name=Multicast
5. The above example should respond with a page that looks similar to the following. Ensure the highlighted areas say enabled.
   
   
   
   
6. You should now be able to use multicast streams by using the following string. Once again, replace the IP address with the address of the device. The value for channel will be replaced by the channel on the recorder. It will stay 1 if it's a camera. Subtype will be 0 for main stream and 1 for substream. 
   
   1. rtsp://<ip_address>/cam/realmonitor?channel=x&subtype=x&unicast=false

Once all the above has been done, you will be able to get a multicast stream. Below is an example using VLC to stream.