All things related to multicast

[Frank Fulchiero <>]

On [Jun 29], at 2:35 PM, Richard Mavrogeanes wrote:
> For public networks, I would argue 300 seconds would be adequate.

However, if you were to use SAP discovery as the major tool to  
advertise your streams, one would have to wait up to 5 minutes to be  
able to view them.
Imagine turning on your TV, and not being able to see CNN, or your  
favorite channel, for 5 minutes.

Testing my own tolerance level for seeing our streams come up, I  
become somewhat impatient at 30 seconds. That's just me.


> The announcements from the VBrick MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WM, and  
> H264 devices default to 30 seconds.
> The announcement frequency has to be more often than the timeout of  
> any SAP listener, which we default to 25 seconds in our servers,  
> players, set top boxes, etc. and change it to match the use case.
> Not sure what the timeout is on other devices.

I was wondering why our SAPs were displaying in VLC for so long after  
we shut them down, and notice the default is 1800 seconds! Not sure  
why it's set so high.

Speaking of "other devices", not including hardware, does anyone know  
if there are software players that can detect SAPs, and play  
different types of video streams (whatever the OS and stream type),  
aside from the VBrick ones and VLC?

Thanks,

Frank Fulchiero
Digital Media Specialist
Connecticut College