All things related to multicast

[Bill Owens <>]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 05:56:32PM -0400, 

 wrote:
> Several months ago Arizona State University signed an agreement with OSTN 
> Cable Television to re-distribute it's multicast feed over our campus CATV 
> system.
> Since that time we have tried unsuccessfully to receive their I2 multicast.

Ed, I don't have a list of the multicast groups that OSTN uses, and the 
portal that I had a URL for (from Case Western) seems to be a little bit 
weirded out. But I was able to extract this URL: 
http://192.5.109.55/ostn_bravo_i2.nsc and feed it manually to WMP, and get a 
multicast stream of EWTN (not Bravo ;) Bitrate seems to be about 1.5 Mbps, 
and the quality is very good.

Looking at MSDP, they appear to be sourcing on three groups:

(192.5.109.55, 233.127.154.11), RP 192.5.109.254, MBGP/AS 32666
(192.5.109.55, 233.127.154.12), RP 192.5.109.254, MBGP/AS 32666
(192.5.109.55, 233.127.154.18), RP 192.5.109.254, MBGP/AS 32666

tcpdump says that they're all on port 19111 (and they still have the fragment 
problem that I told them about a couple of years ago). My VLC will join the 
groups but can't display anything - presumably it's a Microsoft secret codec.

Hmm, just did a little more poking and it appears that 
http://192.5.109.55/ostn_uni.nsc gets you the file that corresponds to group 
233.127.154.18, but that group seems to be coming and going; I no longer see 
it in MSDP, so the stream is failing over to unicast.

Bill.