MCU 4520 Used Video Ports

[Rob Duram]

How can I poll the in-use video ports from the RPC API of a 4520?  I can get totalVideoPorts from the API guide, but I can't tell what API value I need to show ports in use.

[Adam Wamsley]

You can get the total available ports and their modes with device.query, then do some calculations…

With current versions of MCU (API version 2.8) there isn’t a direct way of getting these information via the API. However it is possible to get port usage information by doing some calculation.

You can use ‘participant.enumerate’ command with filter ‘connected|connecting’ to get all active participants on the MCU. Then you can count the number of videoTxCodec(not none) /audioTxCodec(not none) /contentTxCodec(not none) in ‘currentState’ struct to get all the ports used.

You then need to compare the number of audioTxCodec and videoTxCodec, if the number of audioTxCodec is greater than the number of videoTxCodec it means there are audio-only participants.

Adam

[Patrick Sparkman]

To comment on Adam's post about the versioning of the MCU software and associated API.  The most recent MCU software is 4.5, while the API version is 2.11.

telepresence-mcu-4500-series/products-programming-reference-guides-list.html

[Juergen Hornung]

But the TMS Bridge Utilization Report does not separate between video and audio only calls.

As we use our 4520 bridges for phone conferences also, this would be very helpful if Cisco could update the reports for that szenario also.

And to enhance the missing API calls, we have this problem also. Compared to a simple API calls about MCU resources its a huge amount of API calls and calculating to get all MCU resources because its no so easy as it seems. For example to calculate the right video port usage you must look if a video codec is in use, if there is H.239 or streaming in use. And, calculation of that depends also from "Media port mode" settings.

[Rob Duram]

Thanks Adam.  This is definitely one way to do it.  Are there any plans for the API to contain a more direct query of this information?  It just seems odd that it provides totalVideoPorts but then no subsequent totalVidePortsInUse or something of the like.  Likewise, totalAudioPortsInUse, totalContentPortsInUse, etc could be used..

Because of this issue, we are currently using the Status--->> Conferences screen and doing an HTML "screen scrape" to pull the Ports in use information directly from that page.  As wew know that page could change in future version, we would like to see this information available through the API.

[Martin Sloan]

Thanks, @Adam Wamsley!  This is a gem!

[Wayne DeNardi]

If it is at all helpful, TMS 14.5 has new a new Bridge Utilisization reporting function.

See Page 5 of the Release Notes.

Wayne
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[Rob Duram]

Thanks Wayne.  We need to pull the data directly into our application and manually exporting a report is not what we are looking to do.  Could we query the TMS DB directly and do the ETL ourselves?