VBrick Systems EtherneTV NVR User Manual

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EtherneTV v4.2.1 NVR

VBrick ETV Network Video Recorder

Release Notes

May 9, 2008

4410-0162-0005

This publication contains confidential, proprietary, and trade secret information. No part of this document may be copied, photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any machine-readable or electronic format without prior written permission from VBrick. Information in this document is subject to change without notice and VBrick Systems assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuracies. VBrick, VBrick Systems, the VBrick logo, StreamPlayer, and StreamPlayer Plus are trademarks or registered trademarks in the United States and other countries. Windows Media is a trademarked name of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other products or services mentioned in this document are identified by the trademarks, service marks, or product names as designated by the companies who market those products. Inquiries should be made directly to those companies. This document may also have links to third-party web pages that are beyond the control of VBrick. The presence of such links does not imply that VBrick endorses or recommends the content of any third-party web pages. VBrick acknowledges the use of third-party open source software and licenses VBrick products. This freely available source code is posted at http://www.vbrick.com/opensource.

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About VBrick Systems

Founded in 1997, VBrick Systems, an ISO 9001 certified vendor, is a privately held company that has enjoyed rapid growth by helping our customers successfully introduce mission critical video applications across their enterprise networks. Since our founding, VBrick has been setting the standard for quality, performance and innovation in the delivery of live and stored video over IP networks—LANs, WANs and the Internet. With thousands of video appliances installed world-wide, VBrick is the recognized leader in reliable, high-performance, easy-to-use networked video solutions.

VBrick is an active participant in the development of industry standards and continues to play an influential role in the Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA), the MPEG Industry Forum, and Internet2. In 1998 VBrick invented and shipped the world's first MPEG Video Network Appliance designed to provide affordable DVDquality video across the network. Since then, VBrick's video solutions have grown to include Video on Demand, Management, Security and Access Control, Scheduling, and Rich Media Integration. VBrick solutions are successfully supporting a broad variety of applications including distance learning and training, conferencing and remote office communications, security, process monitoring, traffic monitoring, business and news feeds to the desktop, webcasting, corporate communications, collaboration, command and control, and telemedicine. VBrick serves customers in education, government, healthcare, and financial services markets among others.

NVR v4.2 Release Notes

The Network Video Recorder (NVR) is a component of VBrick's Media Control Server Suite and provides a dedicated platform to perform multiple simultaneous recordings of live streams coming from VBrick encoders. The NVR lets you off-load all recording tasks from the ETV Portal Server machine to one or more separate "recorder server" machines. The NVR is available in two versions—one that supports 10 simultaneous records and one that supports 40—and is ideal for environments that require large scale recording on a robust and reliable platform. The NVR is tightly integrated with the Portal Server, the Scheduler, and VBrick's Video-on-Demand servers. See the ETV Portal Server Administrator Guide for related information.

Topics in this document

Installing an NVR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Configuring an NVR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2

NVR Hardware Recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Caveats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Installing an NVR

The NVR is sold as a hardware/software combination or as software-only product. If you purchased the hardware/software combination from VBrick, the Standard or Standalone NVR software will be pre-installed and your server license(s) will be activated. You will still need to configure the NVR as explained in the Portal Server Admin Guide.

If you purchased only the software from VBrick, you must install the NVR software as explained below and then configure it using the instructions in the Admin Guide. If you are using server hardware not purchased from VBrick, be sure to read NVR Hardware Recommendations on page 2.

Installing a Standard NVR

T To install a standard NVR:

1. Go to the "Network Video Recorder" page on the Product CD and double-click on the

Standard NVR setup file.

2. Follow the prompts and exit the window when done.

3. Then open the Portal Server Admin Console and configure the NVR: see "Configuring a Standard NVR" in the Portal Server Admin Guide.

Installing a Standalone NVR

T To install a standalone NVR:

1. Go to the "Network Video Recorder" page on the Product CD and double-click on the

Standalone NVR setup file.

Network Video Recorder Release Notes 1

2. The installation steps are identical to those used to install the Portal Server. See "Installing the Portal Server" in the Portal Server Release Notes for complete details.

3. Follow the prompts and exit the window when done.

4. Then open the Standalone NVR Portal Server Admin Console and configure the NVR: see "Configuring a Standalone NVR" in the Portal Server Admin Guide.

Configuring an NVR

See "NVR Configuration" in the Portal Server Admin Guide for complete configuration instructions.

NVR Hardware Recommendations

If your server hardware was not purchased from VBrick, it must meet the following minimum specifications. The following tables show the recommended hardware and hard drive configuration relative to the number of purchased licenses. VBrick requires that you use dedicated server that meets or exceeds these specifications. The use of a less capable system may adversely affect system performance.

Tab l e 1. Recommended Hardware Specifications

NVR – 10 Record Licenses NVR – 40 Record Licenses

Platform Dell PowerEdge 2950 Dell PowerEdge 2950

Processor Dual Core Xeon Processor 5130,

4MB Cache, 2.00GHz, 1333MHz FSB

Memory 1 GB 533 MHz 2 GB 533 MHz

Storage capacity (2) 73 GB OS drives

(4) 146 GB content drives

RAID Type 2 drive RAID1 for OS drives

4 drive RAID5 for content drives

CPU (1) 3 GHz dual core (2) 3 GHz dual core

RAM 1 GB DDR RAM 2 GB DDR RAM

CDROM 24X IDE CD-ROM 24X IDE CD-ROM

Chassis 2U 2U

Power supply Redundant Redundant

Operating System Windows Server 2003 Web

Edition or Standard Edition

Table 2. Recommended Drive Configuration

(2) Dual Core Xeon Processor 5130, 4MB Cache, 2.00GHz, 1333MHz FSB

(2) 146 GB OS drives (4) 300 GB content drives

2 drive RAID1 for OS drives 4 drive RAID5 for content drives

Windows Server 2003 Web Edition or Standard Edition

NVR Type Recommended Configuration

NVR – 10 Licenses • 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch 10K RPM hard drive

NVR – 40 Licenses • 146GB, SAS, 3.5-inch 10K RPM hard drive

Caveats

This section addresses known issues in this release, most of which have an easy workaround. For more information about any item, or help with an issue not listed here, contact your reseller or VBrick Customer Service.

NVR v4.2 Release Notes

• 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch 10K RPM hard drive

• 146GB, SAS, 3.5-inch 10K RPM hard drive

• 300GB, SAS, 3.5-inch 10K RPM hard drive

• When recording to an NVR from an MPEG-1/MPEG-2 encoder, and you stop the recording before it reaches 1% of the Defined Record Duration, the FTP will fail with an error message on the Status page. The NVR does not recognize extremely small files and this is standard behavior.

• The NVR 40 lets you record any combination of up to 40 MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and WM streams at a time. There are however performance limitations when recording multiple high-rate MPEG-2 or WM streams at the same time. At MPEG-2 rates up to

5.5MBps or WM rates up to 1.2MBps 40 simultaneous recordings are fully supported. At higher rates however the full licensing capacity cannot be used. For example, when using the

Best Quality WM template at 4.5MBps, 10 simultaneous records are supported; when

using MPEG-2 at 15MBps, 15 simultaneous recordings are supported.

• Batch recording to an NVR from a WM VBrick encoder is not supported; the is greyed out on the

Scheduling page. Batch recording is supported from all other VBrick

Batch tab

encoders.

• The Portal Server and the NVR are tightly linked. In order to avoid backward compatibility issues, always upgrade the NVR from the same package when you upgrade the Portal Server, and vice versa.

• In some cases, because of a naming resolution issue, a LAN Network Video Recorder (NVR) does not record when the ETV Portal Server server is in a DMZ. As shown on the status page, the recording will either fail or run indefinitely (without actually recording). To work around this issue, modify (or create) a

hosts file on the ETV Portal

Server as shown below. Go to c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Open the

hosts file in an editor and add the IP address and computer name of the NVR as shown

below. (If the

hosts file is not present, you must create one by saving a txt file with no

extension.)

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp. # This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows. # This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each # entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should # be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.

Network Video Recorder Release Notes 3

# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one # space. Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on # individual lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol. # For example: # 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server # 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

127.0.0.1 localhost

nvr ip address nvr computer name

• The ETV Portal Server and the NVR must be in the same time zone. Also, in order to record successfully, the system time on ETV Portal server and the NVR must be synchronized. You can synchronize the machines, for example, by running the Service for Windows Time on both machines. See "Synchronizing the Portal Server and the NVR" in the Portal Server Admin Guide.

• In order to record multiple streams, the Recorder path must be under FTP root. For example, if root is

C:\Inetpub\ftproot\<your_folder>

C:\Inetpub\ftproot the Recorder path must be

• If you try to uninstall the Microsoft .NET 1.1 framework prior to uninstalling the Network Video Recorder, the uninstall of the Microsoft .NET 1.1 framework will fail because the Network Video Recorder uses this framework. If you need to uninstall the Microsoft .NET 1.1 Framework, you first need to uninstall the Network Video Recorder software.

• The default FTP path in IIS is automatically set via the installer, but, depending on the particular machine's configuration, it may need to be changed. The installer sets the default FTP path to the path to

C:\Inetpub\ftproot. If you have a machine with an E: drive and you want to

D:\Inetpub\ftproot in IIS, if a D: drive is detected. Otherwise it sets

set the FTP path to E:, you need to do two things. First, go to IIS and use the right mouse button to select on the Default FTP Site, select Properties from the popup menu. The Default FTP Site Properties dialog box will appear. Select the

Home Directory tab. In

the Local Path edit box, change the value to E:\Inetpub\ftproot and hit OK. Second, you need to go to the Admin Console > Global Settings > Global Assignments and change

Select FTP root path to E:\inetpub\ftproot and then change Select a media storage path

to E:\inetpub\ftproot\MCS\Record.

VBrick Systems, Inc.

12 Beaumont Road

Wallingford, Connecticut 06492, USA

VBrick Systems EtherneTV NVR User Manual

Specifications and Main Features

Frequently Asked Questions

User Manual