The award-winning Makito X4 Video Encoder, built on the heritage of the hugely popular and bestselling Makito X platform, just got even better with the addition of three new features that improve the reliability, security, and control of live streams.
Synonymous with rock-solid reliability, pristine quality, and low latency, the Makito X4 and Makito X4 Rugged video encoders are trusted by organizations across a wide range of industries from government and defense to enterprise and broadcast. Here’s what you need to know about the new features of the Makito X4 1.2 and how you can benefit.
Path Redundancy for Improved Reliability
Essential for mission-critical applications, Path Redundancy is a hitless failover feature that provides a mechanism for increasing both the reliability and quality of live video streams over IP networks. With Path Redundancy, users can leverage multiple network paths to ensure continual routing of live video even if one IP network path fails, ensuring high-quality contribution for mission-critical applications. Path Redundancy ensures low latency, jitter prevention, and uninterrupted live video streaming. Path Redundancy can route live SRT streams over two or more network paths in real-time. Each network path can use its own combination of IP address and port number or IP socket. Ideally, each network path should be sent over separate NICs (network interface cards). The Makito X4 Video Encoder supports a second NIC via an SFP adaptor. Using separate NICs enables an SRT stream to be routed over separate IP networks, typically two different ISPs or two different datalinks. The two active paths take different routes but are sent to the same receiver. The receiver (SRT listener) accepts the first packet to arrive, over either network.
Second NIC for Reliability and Security
The Makito X4 1.2 firmware upgrade enables a second NIC or second ethernet adaptor for the encoder appliance and blade. By supporting a second NIC through the addition of an SFP+ ethernet adaptor installed within the Makito X4 SFP+ port, Makito users are now able to support Path Redundancy using two separate NICs. The Makito X4 Rugged already includes a second NIC.
Having a second NIC also allows Makito X4 customers to separate the management network from the streaming network. Using two separate networks and NICs for management and streaming strengthens security protocols in instances where a video stream is used by several people in an organization who may not need administration privileges. Firewall rules can also be applied to prevent certain users from accessing a Makito X4 admin IP address, even if they have access to outgoing streams.
In some cases, it may also make sense to keep video content on a separate network than other IP services such as email and enterprise software to avoid non-video services from impacting video network bandwidth. When it comes to multicast streaming over a private network, it also makes perfect sense to keep video networks separate from IT administration. Finally, keeping the IP address and port number or streaming separate from system administration prevents any conflict or confusion at the operating system or application level.
Access Control
Access control enables the Makito X4 to assign a Stream ID to individual SRT streams. By using a unique Stream ID, either automatically generated or customized, the Makito X4 Video Encoder can send multiple SRT streams to a single IP address and UDP port. The Stream IDs can then be used by a receiver to identify and differentiate between ingest streams, apply user password access methods, and in some cases even apply automation based on the naming of the Stream ID. For example, contribution could be sent to a video production workflow and monitoring to a monitoring service.
For broadcasters, Stream ID is key to replacing RTMP for ingesting video streams, especially HEVC content, into cloud service or CDNs that have a single IP socket (address + port) open for incoming video.
