---
title: ZEN MASTER March 2020 RELEASE NOTES
slug: zen-master-march-2020-release-notes
docTags: 
createdAt: 2025-03-20T15:52:21.120Z
---

The following updates were pushed to ZEN Master on March 27, 2020.


Improvements



ZEN Master and the VLC Plugin for Zixi have been updated for low latency Source preview and
the ability to select public or private IP’s.


### Low Latency Stream Preview


When you click View Source in ZEN Master, the previous behavior was to download a .vlc file
that when opened would launch VLC with the necessary parameters to view the Zixi stream.



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One of those parameters was a latency setting for the Zixi protocol and it was defaulted to 4
seconds. This provides very good resiliency for any network conditions but in some cases
previewing sources as close to real-time as possible is preferable.
ZEN Master has been updated to allow the user to choose between the previous high resilience
mode and a low latency mode. For the low latency mode, the Zixi latency is set to 150ms. VLC
itself requires about 300ms to 400ms for decode so the Zixi latency plus VLC decode will be
about 500ms.
With these changes, now when you click on the VLC play button shown above you will be taken
to a Source preview landing page that allows you to choose between “Low Latency” and “High
Resilience”, if the option is available on your platform. This setting is currently available for
Windows and Mac.
Note: The VLC plugin version needs to be 13.1.38157 or later to make use of this feature.
Download links are available on the landing page.



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The Zixi VLC integration is not available on mobile so you will not see the buttons there. You
may also see buttons to choose between “Public” and “Private” networks; this option will be
described later.
After selecting “Low Latency” or “High Resilience”, click the “Play” button. On Windows, a zixi://
URL will be opened which will cause the browser to display the following confirmation dialog:



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Click on “Open VLC media player” to view the stream in VLC. On some browsers you can
“remember” this setting so that you do not need to click on this dialog each time.
Your button selections on the landing page are saved in the browser and will be remembered
from session to session in that browser. Also, you only need to click the “Play” button on the
landing page the first time you view the page. After the settings have been remembered, the
next time you preview Sources the browser will go to the landing page and start the playback
sequence, which may or may not cause the confirmation dialog to appear depending on your
browser. Of course, you can always close VLC and change settings on the landing page and
then click play again.
Note: Unlike before, you can now share the link for the landing page with other ZEN Master
users if you want to easily share the source you are viewing with them. If they are already
logged into ZEN Master the landing page will open on their browser and they can click Play. If
they are not logged in, they will be taken to the ZEN Master login page first and then to the
source preview landing page after logging in.

### Public vs Private IP Selection


In some situations, Zixi Broadcasters are hosted on private networks and the preview of
Sources in ZEN Master needs to remain on the private network, either inside the same facilities
or remotely via VPN back to the facilities where the Broadcasters are hosted.. The “Public” vs
“Private” network buttons on the landing page described above allow the user to choose.
In ZEN Master, for a Broadcaster to have both a public and private IP address it needs to be a
manually configured Broadcaster that has been linked to ZEN Master. Broadcasters spun up on
AWS, GCP, or Azure through ZEN Master cannot have separate public and private IP
addresses.
To configure separate public and private IP addresses, edit the Broadcaster inside its
Broadcaster cluster:



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Go to the advanced setting page



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Set the “Streaming IP” to the public IP address of the Broadcaster and the “Private IP” to the
private IP address of the Broadcaster.

Now when you select “Public” on the Source preview landing page, you will see the public
address in the VLC zixi:// URL.

When you select “Private” on the Source preview landing page, you will see the private address
in the VLC zixi:// URL.

Note that VPN servers typically have much less total throughput capability than an
organization’s connection to the public internet. As such, multiple users viewing video through
the VPN can overwhelm the VPN server.