All things related to multicast

["Richard Mavrogeanes" <>]

You may recall last year when VBrick provided live MPEG-2 multicast coverage 
of Dr. Bob Ballard's mission to the Black Sea.  For those who may have missed 
it, it was a rather specatular event with live high quality video being 
transmitted from a ship in the Black Sea via satellite, downlinked, and 
delivered on the Internet2 via multicast to thousands of viewers.  That 
mission is described in the current issue of National Geographic.

The adventure continues this May/June with two exciting missions.  

First, UCONN, lead by Dr. Ivar Babb, will conduct a live exploration of the 
eastern sea mountins.  This will be broadcast via MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 multicast 
on the Internet2, and via unicast MPEG-4 on the public Internet.  For 
educators, the mission will feature live chat with the science and research 
team each day. This promises to be an exciting event with live video 
broadcast about 12 hours each day, and replayed video at other times.

Then we will broadcast Dr. Ballard's return to the Titanic, live.  This event 
will be more structured than last year, with live produced segments occuring 
four times a day (and unproduced video and/or nothing being delivered at 
other times).

To make viewing easy, I've built a simple mission video web page that you can 
view at www.explorethesea.com.  This page tunes into a low-rate MPEG-4 public 
Internet stream, but you will notice a button for Internet2 participants that 
launches a player (sorry, Windows only for now) that tunes into the 5 Mbps 
MPEG-2 multicast video. Other live and archive views will be added.

I thought this community would be interested in hearing about it first since 
it is likely to be a 'hot' video as the mission gets underway in mid May.  My 
hope is that these events helps to apply proper pressure to local LAN 
administrators who have *still* not provisioned their network for multicast.

You can also view the video via VBrick StreamPlayer, available for free (it 
can use your existing DVD MPEG-2 decoder).  In the coming weeks, the 
www.explorethesea.com site will expose more mission and technical details.

Cheers,

Rich Mavrogeanes