Hi Ed,?

I appreciate the reply. As I said, "they are (were?)". Can you clarify if the routing method has changed? Our issue in 2010(?) was that the routing of the units we purchased for testing onsite was accomplished by rewriting switch port VLANs rather than traditional multicast network routing/IGMP Snooping. I.e. to route a JAP unit on port 1 of a switch to port 20, 25, 33 and 46 you would use the JAP software to command the network switch to change the ports to be on the same VLAN via network switch commands and the receiving JAP units would display whatever streaming video came over that VLAN. If you wanted to route across switches in larger systems, we also would have to add those VLANs to the uplink ports and command the other switches to change the target port VLANs as well. If memory serves, you could only command one switch with the JAP control software, which could be a "real" or "virtual" switch. A "real" switch system would be limited to what you could physically stack together (1U switches with stacking cables) or how many cards you could fit in, say, a Cisco 6800 chassis or similar. All of our network cables would have to be home run to that physical switch, which would have been very problematic for us. A "virtual?switch" was also possible, and would allow you to have multiple switch groups to avoid having to home run everything, i.e. the Cisco Nexus line where the core and FEC expanders can all over a site but be seen as one single switch. We'd considered that idea, but found the FEC expanders to be way too loud to be located in conference and training rooms (think Cisco 3850 fans when it first starts up...but ALL the time...yuck).

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SVSi, Electrosonic/Extron, Evertz, Crestron NVX (which actually wasn't available at the time of our install) and other network protocol streaming products are routed like any other network traffic. I can have all my control devices on VLAN10, streaming devices on VLAN11 and VTC camera/touch panel control on VLAN12, and those assignments never change. Rather than communicating with switches to route things around, we command the decoders directly from the Crestron control system to pull in this or that encoder stream .?

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If JAP products are now using standard network routing like the SVSi and NVX systems are, rather than changing switch?VLANs, that's great as that would give us another product to consider. If it's still routed via commanding network switches to change VLANs for routing, that's not something that works well for our large systems (and our network departments weren't too keen on that either).

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Interested in your thoughts,
Jeff

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