On 3-mrt-04, at 22:54, Melinda Shore wrote:
BTW, the only multicast stream working during last night's plenary
was the MPEG-1 one, and because of the high bit rate it was very lossy.
The other, lower bitrate streams weren't working and the guy running
the service kind of blew me off (and I quote: "watch the video in a
couple weeks after we get back").
I got a similar-spirited reaction after I posted this to the list on
nov 18/19:
"As long as we're bitching about the network: would it be possible to
start doing some unicast streaming of sessions in the future? Access to
multicast hasn't gotten significantly better the past decade, but
streaming over unicast is now routine as the codecs are so much better
these days, as is typical access bandwidth. I'll happily take 40 kbps
MPEG-4 audio only; the video is so badly out of sync that it is
unwatchable most of the time anyway."
Because I really wanted to follow yesterday's multi6 session, I
arranged for some ad-hoc streaming. Kurtis Lindqvist was kind enough to
provide me with an audio/video feed, which I ran through a streaming
server. Despite the fact that we used a microphone built into the
camera the audio was workable, although the video wasn't all that
useful because of the low resolution and mounting limitations.
I think we should consider streaming audio over unicast for all
sessions. There are already microphones in all rooms, right? As this is
only 32 kbps (you can go even lower) and any laptop with audio in and
suitable software can provide the feed, and there is little or no need
to attend to anything during steaming, I'm sure it's possible to work
out the logistics.