Broadcast Radio Forums

Myriad in a Virtual Machine


http://forums.broadcastradio.com/Topic8480.aspx

By Craig Arthur - Tuesday, December 29, 2015 8:31:18 PM

Been having a play around with Myriad in a virtual machine environment at Radio Royal.

We broadcast to the Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert over DVB-T or Freeview and the encoder we have (Promax DT504) has a few spare channels on it. So for the past couple of years the Guys at P Squared Broadcast Radio have arranged a temporary Myriad licence for us to run a pop up radio station – Royal Christmas.

Last year we had it play out from a PC we used to use with Myriad V3, it was old hadn’t been used for yonks and it showed, kept having problems with it crashing and stuttering.  So this year we had this service played out from a Windows 7 based virtual machine on an old HP server we had. 

The Xen Server was also running the automation sustaining service VM for Radio Royal that plays out what we call Royal Replays of previous shows (we use Powerlog and the “Listen Again” add on option to export 58 minute chunks back into Myriad and then play these out another couple of times each week – all hours are either live or “as live” – either replay or voice tracked).

Audio works via Axia streams from the VM to an analogue node and then into the transmission switcher.

Have to say been very impressed with it, the server is a bit long in the tooth so you couldn’t run loads of machines on it, but it’s been rock solid and just worked, to the point we are looking to get a higher powered server and move some more stuff to it.  Once you break the ties to physical audio cards it becomes so much easier to virtualise your infrastructure.

We currently use an Advantech PCI-1750 card to switch the IRN feed into the distribution amp as required and if that can be made to work using Myriad from within a virtual machine I’m all ears!
By Craig Arthur - Thursday, June 9, 2016 6:35:29 PM

That's what I'm thinking, get Myriad to send over a command using the TCP/IP to the relevant port say RR=IRNON then have a stack event that routes IRN channel in to the mix on the node then say 125 seconds later routes nothing the the IRN input to the mix.

We are on V2 on the nodes and using the new matrix mixer on the analogue node to mix in splits from Myriad network and eventually IRN into the output TX channels.

We are doing it all back to front as the transition is phased due to the budgets required.  So very soon routing will be based in livewire even though the studios are still old Clyde Eclipse desks, we just use 2 inputs of a node to get them into the system.

Might ping you a mail re 2 network cards and myriad as we are getting off topic now :-)