Automatic input failover in a standard channel - MediaLive
How it worksFailure handling

Automatic input failover in a standard channel

You can implement automatic input failover in a standard channel to protect the channel from failure in the upstream system or the network connection that is upstream of MediaLive.

You can implement automatic input failover in push inputs, but not in pull inputs.

Keep in mind that the channel can't have more than two push inputs. This means that you can implement one of these scenarios:

  • You can set up two push inputs in the channel, but you won't be able to implement automatic input failover for either of these inputs.

  • You can set up one push input in the channel, and you can implement automatic input failover for that one input.

How it works

To implement automatic input failover for the selected push input, you create two standard-class inputs, in the usual way. When you create the channel, you attach these two inputs and then set them up as a failover pair. Both these steps are covered later in the setting up sections later in this topic.

When you start the channel, MediaLive ingests the content from both inputs. So it ingests four sources (as shown by the red lines in the diagram). But only the content from the first input goes to the channel pipeline. The content from the blue pipeline goes to pipeline 0. The content from the green pipeline goes to pipeline 1.

The pipeline produces two outputs for the downstream system, in the usual way. The downstream system chooses to handle one pipeline and to ignore the other pipeline.

Failure handling

Failure scenario 1

If normal processing is in progress and there is a failure in pipeline 0 in the active input, then the recovery behavior for pipeline redundancy occurs:

  • The channel immediately fails over to pipeline 0 in the second input (which is already being ingested) and starts processing that input. The channel processes the yellow line in pipeline 0, and the green line in pipeline 1. (So there is no change in pipeline 1.) The output is not affected.

  • The downstream system continues to handle the output from the pipeline it had chosen before the problem. The downstream system is not affected by the failure in the pipeline 0.

Failure scenario 2

If normal processing is in progress and there is a failure upstream of the first input, then automatic input failover occurs:

  • The channel immediately fails over to the second input (which is already being ingested) and starts processing that input. The yellow line is processed in pipeline 0, the pink line in pipeline 1. The output is not affected.

  • The downstream system continues to handle the output from the pipeline it had chosen before the problem. The downstream system is not affected by the failure in the first input.