Hi,
I'm not sure if this is useful to anyone but heres how I made Rivendell
work over a remote VPN link seamlessly (India office broadcasting via
the UK). I'd be happy to flesh out a doc with more details if anyone is
interested.
Stuff I used:
* IPSec VPN between the offices (not strictly necessary with Syncthing
and OpenOB but makes life easier)
* Rivendell "Server" this can be any machine that has a running
RDAirplay
* OpenOB (low latency audio codec from James Harrison who used to
frequent these parts not too long ago)
* Syncthing (For copying Audio and the daily DB backup to the remote
office)
* Some sort of hardware Switcher or just good old JACK
In the UK I have 2 studios and the server all plumbed into a hardware
switcher. On the server I have a switcher log that switches between
studios or the server itself at various times of the day.
In order to get Now & Next data working properly, I use the TA macro to
enable/disable now/next at the same time the switcher switches. This
goes off to Icecast, our website and until recently Live 365.
The India office works like this:
* Syncthing keeps the audio sorted (the UK is a master folder that
overwrites India if necessary, looking into a way of scripting the
overwrite)
* Every day the India studio turns on, it imports the most recent copy
of the database from the UK (I didn't want to make them use the UK
database directly because then I have to have them importing things like
pre-recorded news/weather via the UK; you also can't use MySQL
replication without getting a lot more complicated). I do some SQL
magic so that India keeps their own panels so if presenters over there
customise their own panels, the customisations stick.
* India then spawns OpenOB with a 1 second buffer (to iron out any
Internet hiccups) that at the moment connects to OpenOB on the server in
the UK (I did have it on a Raspberry Pi which in turn was on the
hardware switcher but the Audio wasn't balanced and caused issues).
* The UK server then calls jack_connect/jack_disconnect at the proper
times to turn India on and off.
* I also run silent jack on the OpenOB server output so that I can
switch back to automation if we lose the India link (power cuts and
Internet issues are at least a monthly occurence if not weekly).
Stuff I still need to figure out:
* Sync'ing up the Played data to the UK Riv for legal compliance. At
the moment I use the website now/next records but I guess it would be
nice to keep the Rivendell reports as an option.
* Silent Jack in reverse to switch back to India after an outage (I
can't think of a nice way to transition back as you'd want to somehow
tell India when they are live so they can start rather than cutting
songs or adverts etc as soon as they came online)
I also do some work with Asterisk servers, IAX trunks, baresip and some
in house software (available on Github) to bring in on air callers
without anyone noticing they go to India at certain times of day.
I've worked with Icecast relays in the past but I must admit having a
sub 1 second latency (I ping ~ 200ms to India on a good day) made things
really easy, especially with presenter training and being able to baby
sit new starters over the phone.
Anyway, I hope this gives someone ideas if they find themselves in a
similar situation.
Regards,
Wayne
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