Devices
In the UI, Devices lives under the Live Production group in the left rail.
What is a Device
A Device is one C21 Live Encoder instance paired with the control plane. A Device exposes a channel capacity and a set of licence allowances; starting a Live stream consumes one of those channels on the bound Device. The same Device can run several concurrent Live streams up to its licence ceiling.
Devices are either on-prem (a physical encoder on the local network) or cloud — backed by a C21 Live Cloud account that provisions encoders on demand.
Listing
The Devices list is one row per registered Device. The table exposes six columns:
| Column | Content |
|---|---|
| Device | Composite cell: alias on top, capability chips (CPU, GPU, VPU — GPU highlighted green when active) and the Device IP below. |
| Performance | 8-bar live gauge: CPU, Mem, Sys disk, Data disk, GPU use, GPU mem, GPU encoding, GPU decoding — each with a live percentage. |
| Status | 3×3 indicator grid (channels in use vs licensed channels) — green = busy, grey = idle. |
| Groups | List of Device groups the Device belongs to. |
| Location | Free-text Location field. |
| Software version | Encoder build tag. |
Canonical API fields
Regardless of how the list table renders them, the Device object returned by the API carries the following fields:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
alias | Display name reused across the UI, API and logs. |
location | Free-form site marker (for example "Studio A — Rack 3U"). |
ip_address | The Device LAN IP C21 Live Control talks to (UI label Server IP on the detail drawer). |
type | One of Encoder, Decoder, Control. Not rendered as a list column. |
enabled | 1 when the Device is available for control, 0 when disabled. Managed from the Device is enabled toggle on the detail drawer. |
mountstatus | One of mounted, unmounted, unknown — the state of the Device storage mount. Reflected indirectly in the Data disk bar of the Performance column. |
licensed | Per-Device license allowances exposed as a small object: channels, outputs, publishing_points. The values come from the Encoder's installed license file: channels is the Quantity of the C21LiveEncoder license; publishing_points is the Quantity of the Multi Publishing Points license. Reflected in the Status column. See Licenses. |
Adding a Device
Click Add device. The form asks for:
- Alias — the Device's display name.
- IP address — the Device LAN IP.
- Type — typically
Encoder. - Enabled — leave on for normal operation.
- Register username and Register password — the one-time encoder credentials Live Control uses, at submit time only, to retrieve a remote token from the Device. These are the encoder's built-in
adminuser and its password — on the encoder host, runliveencoder credentials showto confirm the username andliveencoder credentials resetto set or rotate the password.
The credentials are write-only: they are not stored and never returned by the API. On submit the server attempts the registration; the outcome is reported as registration_status on the row — one of registered, failed or skipped (skipped means no credentials were supplied). When the registration fails the error message is exposed on registration_error.
Detail
The detail drawer (double-click on a row) shows the Basic data block with the following editable fields:
| Drawer field | Backed by | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Device is enabled (toggle) | enabled | Enables or disables the Device for control. |
| Alias | alias | Display name. |
| Server IP | ip_address | The Device LAN IP. |
| Location | location | Free-text. |
| Access recordings (toggle) | edit_recordings | Whether the Recordings written by this Device surface in the Recordings section. |
| Enable debug mode (toggle) | — | Enables additional log capture on the Device for diagnostics; leave off in normal operation. |
To see which Live streams are currently consuming this Device and compare utilisation against the licensed channels allowance, see the On air view — the on-air row identifies the Device in use.
Cross-links
- Device groups for grouping Devices into pools.
- Live streams overview for the binding from a Live stream to its Device.
- C21 Live Cloud for the cloud-backed Device flow.
FAQ
channels value in its licensed allowance. Each running Live stream consumes one channel; once the allowance is exhausted, additional starts have to wait.