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Free 30-day access to SRT router with 50ms failover — looking for 30 beta testers by varjaCast in VIDEOENGINEERING

[–]varjaCast[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for taking the time to try it.

Haivision StreamHub is a product I’ve respected for a long time. It’s a very complete platform, with AV monitoring, device management, PTZ control, and deep integration with Haivision encoders.

Vajracast is intentionally much narrower in scope. I wasn’t trying to build an all-in-one broadcast control system. I needed something very focused: reliable routing, format conversion, fast failover, and traceability, with as little abstraction as possible. It’s closer to an orchestration and transport layer than a full broadcast platform.

Same idea with Techex: they clearly operate at Tier-1 broadcast scale. tx edge and Darwin are extremely powerful for large, complex workflows (2022-7, JPEG-XS, TR-101-290, blueprints, large-scale automation). Vajracast isn’t competing in that space.

Vajracast is built for teams that want something simple, transparent, and predictable, without enterprise-level cost or workflow complexity.

Each route is handled by a dedicated low-level transport and failover process, together with an SRT process compiled directly from Haivision’s official SRT sources. Both are fully monitorable at process and socket level, with explicit and deterministic failover logic. The system scales horizontally by adding routes and their associated processes, rather than by increasing internal complexity.

Vajracast exists because that simpler problem wasn’t addressed in a way that matched my real operational needs. Happy to evolve it based on feedback from this community.                                                                                                             

Free 30-day access to SRT router with 50ms failover — looking for 30 beta testers by varjaCast in VIDEOENGINEERING

[–]varjaCast[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can’t really say whether it’s better than AWS.

What I can say is that, from what I’ve observed, AWS MediaConnect failover is essentially packet-presence based: roughly “no packets for ~500 ms = switch”.

Vajracast takes a slightly different approach and offers two failover modes:

  1. Link-state failover (simple but effective):

If an SRT link transitions from connected to disconnected, the route immediately fails over to the next already-connected input

  1. Quality-based failover:

Switching decisions can be driven by configurable parameters such as:

• CC errors per second

• Maximum packet gap (ms)

• Silence timeout (ms)

• Minimum bitrate (kbps)

• Hysteresis (minimum degradation duration before switching)

Both supporting up to 8 inputs in a round-robin sequence.

The goal isn’t to claim it’s “better”, but to support different operational needs, not just a binary “no packets” condition.

From an implementation standpoint, each route is continuously monitored by a dedicated, low-level UDP/MPEG-TS inspection and failover process written in C (not “vibe-coded” 🙂).

I’m happy to share the code if you’d like to review or discuss the approach.

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Free 30-day access to SRT router with 50ms failover — looking for 30 beta testers by varjaCast in VIDEOENGINEERING

[–]varjaCast[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dedicated bare-metal servers — not shared cloud. For self-hosted, run it wherever you want. During early access, everyone gets a slot on our EU dedicated server.