All things related to multicast

[Bill Owens <>]

At 13:32 -0700 9/4/03, John Zwiebel wrote:
> FWIW -- check out:
>   http://videolan.org/
>
> multiplatform (mac, widows, linux binaries available), easy to use 
> (even I can do it),
> all the major codecs, same app to source and to receive mcast and its free.
>
> I have been able to source a DVD and receive that transmission as if it
> were playing locally.  I don't want you to think it doesn't have bugs, but
> they've been releasing new versions every two weeks.

I've been using VideoLAN for a while to watch local content and 
receive MPEG-2 transport streams (from VBricks, mostly). It 
definitely continues to improve. For the most part it works 
reasonably well, but I've noticed two deficiencies:

 - Audio/video sync is great for local files, but broken for streams. 
Not a problem for things like the Monterey Bay cameras, but a big 
issue for watching a seminar or musical performance.

 - Recovery from loss seems weak, at best, especially in the presence 
of any latency.

I did some very limited testing between Columbia and here, over a 
nice clean path, and found that streaming an MPEG-2 file from disk 
wasn't very enjoyable. However that was only a very brief trial, and 
with an older version.

If anyone else wants to test, I have some legal content available* 
and can source or sink. I'm a bit constrained on bandwidth just this 
moment, so we might have to keep it to MPEG-1. And it isn't germane 
to this group, but I'm also interested in testing IPv4 vs IPv6 
unicast streams over the wide area. . .

* I _LOVE_ archive.org, and think Rick Prelinger deserves a Nobel 
Prize in some category or another. . .

Bill.