Optimising network topology to use SS
I'm just about to replace an analog CCTV setup at a church (running on a Hikvision DVR) with SS on an M1 Mac Mini. Im wondering if there's any resource I can refer to which would help me optimise the network topology to avoid camera streams interfering with other network traffic. It's a reasonably complex network spanning two buildings with a multitude of ethernet switches. I also run some HDMI over TCP/IP. There will be half a dozen 5MP ip cameras.
The sort of things that come to mind are whether to run all the cameras to one switch which then connects to the Mac, or whether to have some sort of managed switch to optimise the traffic. Or perhaps I'm worrying unnecessarily and the network load of ip cameras will not be a problem.
Comments
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Good-quality modern switches - even unmanaged ones - will intelligently route traffic to optimise network performance, and traffic at one individual port won't interfere with unrelated traffic at a different port.
For example, if you have four devices connected into a switch that is rated at 1 Gigabit, where device A is sending data to device B, and device C is sending data to device D, then each data transfer will operate at up to 1 Gbps, and neither transfer will affect the other.
In other words, the 1 Gbps speed is per port, not split between all ports. You can verify this by checking the switch's datasheet, where it should report a number for its "total bandwidth" or "aggregate throughput" or "total switching capacity" or suchlike, which should be the per-port speed multiplied by the number of ports multiplied by 2 (because they count data in and data out separately). So a 1 Gbps switch with 8 ports should list 16 Gbps as its total bandwidth spec.
Don't count on this for no-name cheap switches; I'm talking about reputable devices made by the likes of Netgear, TP-Link, Ubiquiti etc.
The situation is similar for two separate switches connected together: with your regular devices connected to the first switch, and your cameras and SecuritySpy Mac connected to the second switch, even though everything is on the same network and and all devices are accessible to all other devices, the camera traffic won't be seen by the first switch; the second switch will route the streams directly from the cameras to the SecuritySpy Mac, and the network speed of the devices on the first switch will be unaffected.
I would also say that 6x 5 MP cameras is well within the limits of a 1 Gbps link, especially if these cameras are sending video in H.265 format (which basically all new IP cameras now support), so the Mac will have plenty of bandwidth left over for other network transfers.
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+1 to what Ben said.
FWIW, we have all hardwired cameras on dedicated switches (UBI USW Pro's) but this is primarily for security - the only outside traffic that can reach these switches is hardcoded so network mgmt, apple TV's that are used for monitoring and remote access for us. You can also have the cameras switch completely separate and do dual ethernet on the SS server; one for cameras and one for outside world. I think Ben has a post somewhere talking about this latter.
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That's a good point - for security/privacy purposes, some users prefer to completely segregate the cameras on their own virtual or physical LAN. Our article about this is Segregating IP Cameras on their own LAN.
