Ubiquiti/Unifi Settings for Binary MoIP

[Dueport]

We have a new Binary 900 Series system (B-900-MOIP-4K-CTRL; 5 TVs with the B-900-MOIP-4K Receivers; 8 sources with the B-900-MOIP-4K-TX Transmitters; and an audio out to the Audio Matrix using a B-900-MOIP-AUDIO-RX) running through our Ubiquiti Unifi Network but I'm having trouble with audio dropouts.

I think the issue is proper settings for the Ubiquiti Unifi Network and need help converting the MoIP Network Setup Guidelines to the proper Ubiquiti Unifi settings. Other threads have touched on this but I still can't get it to work but I know others have. Could someone that's done this (or understands networking better) please help me?

Here's the hardware setup: Dream Machine Pro via 10gig fiber to Aggregation Switch (USW Aggregation) which then connects via 10gig fiber to 2 distribution switches (both are the US 48 500W). All Binary devices are on the same distribution switch per the MoIP Network Setup guidelines.

Here's the network setup in Ubiquiti Unifi Dashboard: 1.) Under Settings —> Multicast Settings -> multicast filtering/IGMP snooping is enabled on the network; & 2.) Under Settings -> global switch settings. -> jumbo frames is enabled. Please see screen shot for complete settings for that section.

The above settings were added because the MoIP Network Setup Guidelines say:

1.) "Verify Jumbo Frame: Choose SETTINGS > PORTS, then verify Jumbo Frame is set to greater than 8,000 Bytes. The default value is 9216 (the maximum) and is acceptable."

2.) "Enable IGMP Snooping; Choose ADVANCED > MULTICAST > IGMP SNOOPING, then check options as follows: 1. Status: Enabled / 2. Version: V2 / 3. Report Suppression: Enabled / 4. Unregistered IPMC Forward Action: Flood / 5. IGMP Snooping Status: Enabled / 6. Fast Leave: Enabled / 7. Querier State: Enabled / 8. Querier Version: V2 / 9. Router Settings > Router Ports Auto-Learned: Enabled."

I suspect the audio dropouts may be related so the subitems 2-8 specific to IGMP Snooping because I can't find anything that looks like that in the settings.

A number of people have posted in the past that Ubiquiti Unifi networks running Binary systems are working perfectly for them and they have referenced enabling jumbo frames and IGMP snooping too - but there's got to be something else I'm missing. Can someone please help me catch what I'm missing?

I've attached a screen shot of the Multicast settings page in case that's helpful. Thank you for any and all help!

 

[TundraSonic]

Watching...

We've had problems w/ Binary systems seeming to not like passing mode changes along quickly enough. So if someone navigates too quickly and their device, Apple TV for instance, switches from Stereo to Dolby 5.1 to Dolby Atmos in fast succession then no audio. I'm thinking that perhaps the device is sending Atmos but the receiver is expecting Stereo. The best solution I've found is to slow down clicking.

FWIW, I've had IGMP Snooping create more problems than it solves (even when exempting stuff) so I keep it off unless necessary. UI is great stuff in a lot of ways but software updates seem to fix 5 things but break 2 so you do need to be careful what versions you're on.

 

[lippavisual]

Enable flow control.  Personally, I’d also set this up as a separate VLAN. 

[Dueport]

1 hour ago, lippavisual said:

Enable flow control.  Personally, I’d also set this up as a separate VLAN. 

HUGE thanks @lippavisual I really appreciate your help - I'll give this a shot and see if it makes the difference. I'll look into the VLAN approach too. Any other changes you'd suggest for smooth operation of Binary systems over Ubiquiti networks? 

[lippavisual]

Unfortunately, with UniFi, you’re very limited to what you can configure.  Hence why moving the MoIp system to a separate VLAN will help.  Tag the ports you’re using for MoIP to that VLAN and that will help with the “chatter”.

I’ve done large Dante Audio setups on UniFi (customer owned) and the only way to clear up the “issues” was a VLAN.

No experience with MoIP on UniFi, but most of these systems have the same switch requirements.

[tmj4]

1) VLANs are a good start

2) Unifi gear (which I have my house outfitted with) is going to be a bit more difficult to get working with the AVoIP (and thus MoIP) equipment. Would recommend going with an EdgeSwitch for this equipment.

3) Would recommend having an entirely separate physical network for any of the AVoIP stuff -- this is what I do with my MXNet equipment.

[lippavisual]

I'd +1 for a separate switch just for MoIP. 

[msgreenf]

always a separate switch - even if using Araknis

[TundraSonic]

3 hours ago, tmj4 said:

2) Unifi gear (which I have my house outfitted with) is going to be a bit more difficult to get working with the AVoIP (and thus MoIP) equipment. Would recommend going with an EdgeSwitch for this equipment.

3) Would recommend having an entirely separate physical network for any of the AVoIP stuff -- this is what I do with my MXNet equipment.

I know of editing houses that operate with a single physical UI network pushing a lot more and bigger streams than OP mentioned. I'm having difficulty grasping why the little bit that the OP was talking about would come close to justifying a separate physical network. VLAN, yes, but physical?

[tmj4]

6 minutes ago, TundraSonic said:

I'm having difficulty grasping why the little bit that the OP was talking about would come close to justifying a separate physical network. VLAN, yes, but physical?

I generally do as well, but once moving past just audio (Dante, for example) most manufacturers recommend simply having a separate physical network.

[Dueport]

Thanks guys appreciate all this input. Right now I have all the moip stuff on the same distribution switch but not a distribution switch with only moip stuff in it. I can understand that as being suggested above as a “dedicated” switch but if I do that it would be adopted on the same UniFi controller and linked to the same aggregation switch right? But to clarify @tmj4 you’re suggesting I should have that moip switch totally physically separate so it would have a separate UniFi controller etc? Not sure how to do that and have c4 on one network talking to a physically separate moip network 

[TundraSonic]

I've got some spare switches so I may try moving some of the Binary stuff over and see if it fixes the problems we're having.  

[Cyknight]

27 minutes ago, Dueport said:

Not sure how to do that and have c4 on one network talking to a physically separate moip network

This simply means moving all moip decoders and encoders to their own physical switch, with one port on that switch going to your core switch (allowing your C4 system to still talk to the moip controller, stream to moip endpoints etc)This ensures Moip (or similar) have a dedicated network backbone and dedicated path to communicate with each other.

A VLAN can help on the software side, shielding moip or other video over ip devices from any chatter from other devices, and just as much the other way around, though with moip specifically that isn't a hard requirement.

The physical 'dedicated' switch is a much higher priority than a VLAN

[DanITman]

Your 48 port switch is on the older end of Unifi gear.  I'd recommend the Pro line switches if you are doing Moip. 

Unifi seems to be doing a lot of work in this area on their switches and it might be worth going into early access firmware to see if that helps.  I've ran the 900 series on my unifi setup and it worked well but I didn't use it for audio, I was mainly focused on video distribution.  I put the Moip devices in a VLAN and enabled all the settings you have above.  Everything worked well.  I eventually ditched it because it wouldn't do 4k60.  

Like others have stated, it might be best to pick up a netgear switch and keep moip on its own switch.  Netgear is an SDVOE partner and has all the settings built in to support Moip. 

[Popolou]

19 hours ago, TundraSonic said:

I know of editing houses that operate with a single physical UI network pushing a lot more and bigger streams than OP mentioned. I'm having difficulty grasping why the little bit that the OP was talking about would come close to justifying a separate physical network. VLAN, yes, but physical?

 

19 hours ago, tmj4 said:

I generally do as well, but once moving past just audio (Dante, for example) most manufacturers recommend simply having a separate physical network.

For the most part, there are two main reasons why a separate switch is often suggested and it comes down to both the "switching capacity" & "forwarding rate" of the unit and its feature set/services that it runs. So, despite the switch being say a 24-port gigabit unit, its network backplane (ie the internal processing of it) may be incapable of reading, processing and forwarding all the ports at the maximum speed in duplex (two-way) mode. A media stream converted to packet data taxes the network hardware more than data that is designed for packetised transmission. The other is the services it runs so that you can manage the data throughput of (say) multicast traffic. A broadcasting device will send the data as multicast meaning it is sent to everyone. If the switch is not configured to direct that multicast traffic to only the connected devices that can process/accept it, it gets sent to every port on the network switch causing huge amounts of wasted traffic and eventually bring the whole subnet to a grinding halt. Certain features (IGMP Snooping in this case) will cause a switch to send the same data stream to the right place. This is mostly networking 101, which installers know about and it is why they recommend splitting it out. So Ubiquiti were mentioned and are notoriously poor in this area - proper enterprise-grade kit can easily manage the combination of data types but you won't find people putting network switches of say $5k in homes. And for the most part, a dedicated network created for video transmission is unlikely to be swapped out any time soon so the ROI tends to be better.

[TundraSonic]

22 minutes ago, Popolou said:

For the most part, there are two main reasons why a separate switch is often suggested...

I understand what you're saying but it doesn't make sense. At one facility I worked in last year the only physically dedicating switching was for the rendering farm which were Cisco.

Everything else was a shared UI network of VLANs. IIRC there were 5 editing bays, 2 screening rooms, and about 30 offices all sharing the same UI network. Editing mostly used 8k/60 ProRes which are massively larger than anything the OP is likely to be doing and we didn't have problems. Editing bays got stuff to/from servers with no problems, stuff could be streamed to a screening room with no glitches, and there would often be a handful of video conference calls going on.   

If it can handle all of that on physically shared switches it should certainly be able to handle a few piddly streams w/ Binary MoIP devices. What we're talking about here should be far below even beginning to tax these switches.

[msgreenf]

8 minutes ago, TundraSonic said:

I understand what you're saying but it doesn't make sense. At one facility I worked in last year the only physically dedicating switching was for the rendering farm which were Cisco.

Everything else was a shared UI network of VLANs. IIRC there were 5 editing bays, 2 screening rooms, and about 30 offices all sharing the same UI network. Editing mostly used 8k/60 ProRes which are massively larger than anything the OP is likely to be doing and we didn't have problems. Editing bays got stuff to/from servers with no problems, stuff could be streamed to a screening room with no glitches, and there would often be a handful of video conference calls going on.   

If it can handle all of that on physically shared switches it should certainly be able to handle a few piddly streams w/ Binary MoIP devices. What we're talking about here should be far below even beginning to tax these switches.

You can't compare pro equipment to unfi. The back plane and processing is totally different levels. 

[TundraSonic]

10 minutes ago, msgreenf said:

You can't compare pro equipment to unfi. The back plane and processing is totally different levels. 

I'm comparing UI to UI.  

[Popolou]

31 minutes ago, TundraSonic said:

I understand what you're saying but it doesn't make sense. At one facility I worked in last year the only physically dedicating switching was for the rendering farm which were Cisco.

Everything else was a shared UI network of VLANs. IIRC there were 5 editing bays, 2 screening rooms, and about 30 offices all sharing the same UI network. Editing mostly used 8k/60 ProRes which are massively larger than anything the OP is likely to be doing and we didn't have problems. Editing bays got stuff to/from servers with no problems, stuff could be streamed to a screening room with no glitches, and there would often be a handful of video conference calls going on.   

If it can handle all of that on physically shared switches it should certainly be able to handle a few piddly streams w/ Binary MoIP devices. What we're talking about here should be far below even beginning to tax these switches.

It sure can be on the same networking layer (L2) but if you do that, the data flow will knock out all the other devices also competing for the same bandwidth. You see, when a device connects through a switch, it introduces itself so that the switch builds a mapping table and "switches" the data to the right endpoint. The sending device is then communicating to the receiving device (each session runs on a port of which there are 65k of them in total). Running media/video/voice over IP then creates a 1:1 relationship between the sender and the receiver. So, to then send media encoded at say 65Mbps to just 5 endpoints means the sender has to open a dedicated connection to each endpoint and push through the same data content but in aggregate. So what was only say a 65Mbps transmission actually consumes 325Mb of a 1000Mb connection (or say 40MB per second). That's already 30% of the max capacity of a single Gb LAN connection and which that switch has to juggle internally with everything else (don't forget that VoIP and other media also has latency to worry about so it is often considered priority traffic above all else).

Alternatively, multicast then allows the data to be sent once but the switch itself copies the stream to the media receivers leading to a huge saving across the board.

So, yes you can put this altogether but you need proper kit to manage it (and as the boss man just said) you cannot compare unifi with enterprise hardware. Very few non-enterprise kit does this properly.

[Popolou]

@Dueport Ignoring VLANS for the moment, it should work if this is on a flat network. But, i wouldn't be surprised if you monitor the CPU usage on the switch whilst there is a transmission and you see that it is maxing out at 100%. That could be the cause for the dropouts. Just a guess at this stage to be honest.

The main problem you have however (and unless things have changed) is that the Unifi gear has a very crippled interpretation of IGMP Snooping and no option to set the IGMP Querier in the UI. It can be done through the CLI if i recall but it is actually the Ubiquiti Edgeswitch line that has these features exposed, not the Unifi line.

https://community.ui.com/questions/Feature-Request-IGMP-Snooping-and-Querier-WEB-UI-Configuration/a3632e8e-60c9-4310-b351-d8ea7409f781

Everything else you configured is correct but i suspect you could push through and make it work if you set this up via the CLI - but be warned that the settings will not persist on reboot. So looking at the Binary install guide, the commands below are the ones you will need: -

set igmp querier address (OF THE SWITCH)
set igmp querier query-interval 125

Best of luck
Pops

Edited to add - If it helps, on one site i have a full UI system but we push our MoIP over netgear M4250 series switches to avoid this very same issue. They're pricey but they work. I believe the other commonly used kit is from Cisco such as the CBS350X range which for a 24-port is actually reasonably priced. Even still, you can get its predecessor (SG350X) off flea'bay for a deal and they should still work very well if EoL doesn't bother you (the latest and likely final firmware for it was only in December).

Edited June 12 by Popolou
Addendum

[ekohn00]

1 hour ago, msgreenf said:

You can't compare pro equipment to unfi. The back plane and processing is totally different levels. 

Just because it is pro doesn’t mean the architecture is non-blocking or even has significant processing.

[msgreenf]

8 minutes ago, ekohn00 said:

Just because it is pro doesn’t mean the architecture is non-blocking or even has significant processing.

that is true; but most of the hardware I see in F100, even at the front line edge is all non-blocking

[bavariatech]

On 6/12/2024 at 6:05 PM, Popolou said:

@Dueport

Edited to add - If it helps, on one site i have a full UI system but we push our MoIP over netgear M4250 series switches to avoid this very same issue. They're pricey but they work. I believe the other commonly used kit is from Cisco such as the CBS350X range which for a 24-port is actually reasonably priced. Even still, you can get its predecessor (SG350X) off flea'bay for a deal and they should still work very well if EoL doesn't bother you (the latest and likely final firmware for it was only in December).

Hello

 

Which M4250 profile did you use for binary MoIP?

We're just doing a project witch several M4250 and about 30 screens, 10 sources... now i want to setup the 4 switches for that job. Recognized that my few TX/RX in the test setup get offline after some time, first OvrC, then even locally

[Popolou]

Don't have it to hand but IIRC, the basic Video template worked in conjunction with the others using it as a base (Video with AES67 audio, Dante, Q-SYS...).