Signera Knowledgebase
IT Department & Network Administrator Questions and Answers for the Media Players. What Ports? What Transport Protocol? Etc.
Typically these questions are asked by IT departments trying to understand what they need to do to allow the Signera Media player on their network in a secure way, while also opening up the access the player needs to function correctly.
The media player makes HTTP and HTTPS TCP requests, just like a normal user visiting a web site using a web browser would. This would be using outgoing ports 443 and 80 (standard web ports using standard TCP packets).
All sensitive data is encrypted with 128 or 256 bit encryption using signed HTTPS certificates. More on security can be found here: http://www.signera.net/security/
We use our own internal web client on the media player, and this reaches out to www.signera.net on a predetermined interval.
No incoming ports need opened, no NAT configurations will get in the way, no proxy configurations, etc.
When a media player reaches out, it asks for any updates. If the servers see updates for the media player, it responds with the updates, otherwise it tells the media player it doesn't have any updates and to check back in later.
Because the media player does check on an interval, we do recommend IT doesn't setup any proxy or caching. The media player should be able to get unobstructed access to www.signera.net and check for updates.
Bandwidth requirements are negligible. A normal handshake between the servers and a media player contains a few KB of text. When a new video needs downloaded, this obviously will use more bandwidth. But data is stored locally on the media player, so only if large video files are updated frequently or deleted from the media player frequently, will you notice higher bandwidth requirements.
If anything, latency matters more, as the HTTP/HTTPS connection will timeout after 60 seconds or so. The biggest issue we've seen in setup over the thousand or so media players is weak Wireless, which causes a patchy connection with high packet loss.
If you have any further questions, please reach out to 301-714-0110 x1 or support@signera.net
