Nov 102016
 

I recently got my hands on a D-Link DCS-5222L IP Camera and thought it would be pretty cool to get it setup to do YouTube Live streaming. To configure the stream I would have to find a way to convert and encode the RTSP stream from the camera to a YouTube Live compatible RTMP stream.

The information in this post can be used for other streaming services that require an RTMP stream like Facebook!

I figured I would see if I could use VLC or FFMPEG to convert the stream. I had no luck with VLC however I found out ffmpeg should do what I needed to do. I couldn’t easily find the proper usage command and flags, however eventually after viewing multiple sites, mixing, matching, and testing, I found this command worked:

ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp -i rtsp://IP.CAM.ADD.RESS/live1.sdp -framerate 30 -video_size 1280x720 -vcodec libx264 -preset veryfast -maxrate 1984k -bufsize 3968k -vf "format=yuv420p" -g 60 -c:a aac -b:a 128k -ar 44100 -f flv rtmp://YOUTUBELIVE/DIR/StreamKey

Happy streaming! And if anyone can refine, or recommend better command usage, please post in the comments!

Nov 052016
 

Yesterday, I had a reader (Nicolas) leave a comment on one of my previous blog posts bringing my attention to the MTU for Jumbo Frames on the HPE MSA 2040 SAN.

MSA 2040 MTU Comment

Since I first started working with the MSA 2040. Looking at numerous HPE documents outlining configuration and best practices, the documents did confirm that the unit supported Jumbo Frames. However, the documentation on the MTU was never clearly stated and can be confusing. I was under the assumption that the unit supported 9000 MTU, while reserving 100 bytes for overhead. This is not necessarily the case.

Nicolas chimed in and provided details on his tests which confirmed the HPE MSA 2040 does actually have a working MTU of 8900. In my configuration I did the tests (that Nicolas outlined), and confirmed that the MTU would cause packet fragmentation if the MTU was greater than 8900.

ESXi vmkping usage: https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1003728

This is a big discovery because packet fragmentation will not only degrade performance, but flood the links with lots of packet fragmentation.

I went ahead and re-configured my ESXi hosts to use an MTU of 8900 on the network used with my SAN. This immediately created a MASSIVE performance increase (both speed, and IOPS). I highly recommend that users of the MSA 2040 SAN confirm this on their own, and update the MTUs as they see fit.

Also, this brings up another consideration. Ideally, on a single network, you want all devices to be running the same MTU. If your MSA 2040 SAN is on a storage network with other SAN devices (or any other device), you may want to configure all of them to use the MTU of 8900 if possible (and of course, don’t forget your servers).

A big thank you to Nicolas for pointing this out!