Tip Of The Day #052

Tip Of The Day #052

While multicast is a perfectly acceptable way to set up your show network I would generally recommend against it:

1. Multicast on 99.9% of home networks is actually broadcast … so every controller is seeing every universe … on large shows this is a serious problem.
2. Wifi networks are particularly bad
3. It is even worse when you are running really low end controllers as they can be flooded
4. Multicast is generally more taxing on controllers resulting in the ability to support less universes
5. If you use multicast then any time you want to upload to controllers their configuration you have to select them all and then enter the IP address. If they are setup as unicast you just select one and upload it and all related universes are automagically found and sent.
6. With bulk edit now available in the setup tab changing IP addresses is no longer the chore it once was.
7. You are much more likely to have packet routing issues on machines with multiple network cards (see tod #050)

So are there situations where you should use multicast … I can think of only one:

1. When you want multiple controllers to use the same universe data