LCCS P2P includes one to many as well?

[Mickey79]

Hello,

Just to confirm does LCCS include Stratus like one to many multicasting, or only one to one.

For example, in a one to many video chat, for example one user streaming to 7 clients. With LCCS if P2P is available will it use P2P multicasting or switch to hub and spoke server streaming?

Cheers

[Former Community Member]

The answer to it depends on number of clients and number of streams each is sharing. If you are using 7 clients, it will switch back to hub-spoke.

Thanks

Hironmay Basu

[Mickey79]

Thanks Hironmay, could you let me know how it decides? What are the limits for multicasting with LCCS?

Could Stratus by itself handle 1 to 7 for example?

[Raff_ · Accepted solution]

Just to be clear, Stratus by itself doesn't give you multicasting and/or client management. This is from

the Stratus documentation page:

"Stratus is a beta, hosted rendezvous service that aids establishing communications between Flash Player endpoints."

So, rtmfp is the protocol that allows, among other things, multicasting. In order to do multicasting you need a way to identify the connected clients. One way is to use a full implementation for rtmfp, as it will be provided by future versions of FMS, one is to use Stratus, that only provides this functionality.

Once you have that you can write a Flash application that connect to as many clients as you want, but you'll find out that after a certain number of clients, depending on your network configuration, bandwidth, etc. your application will become unresponsive.

LCCS uses FMS as the communication mechanism, and when configured for the "rtmfp" protocol it uses a pre-release of rtmfp-enabled FMS. When working in p2p mode, LCCS takes care of all the "management" stuff to select clients to talk to, keep the connection alive, reconnect if necessary and swtich to non-p2p mode if the network conditions worsen or if you have too many clients for a reliable p2p session.

Currently we limit the number of clients connected to the p2p session, and the maximum number is currently not configurable. Not sure what the number is (I don't have the source code handy) but we asked the rtmfp engineers for a reasonable number.

Again, if you implement your own p2p messaging on top of Stratus you can experiment and see what the real limit for your particular configuration is (and find out that may or may not be higher than what we use). You can probably use one of the Stratus examples to see what you get and then decide what product is better suited for your use case.

[Mickey79]

Thanks Raff. It would be good to have the max number of users that can connect via P2P and when it switches to hub and spoke.

This would determine the default number of users in my social gaming app that can connect...

Much appreciated all the help so far

[Former Community Member]

Hi Mickey,

Sorry for the delay. It just slipped out of my mind.

If you are using only one stream per user be it audio or camera, you can have upto 3 users each sharing their streams with each other.

However, if every user is sharing both audio and webcam, then you won't be able to have more than two.

One thing I would like to add is we are also working intensely on supporting Data Streams also using P2P like chat as part of user requests and those will be coming in future releases.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Hironmay Basu