Live Intranet Broadcasting?

[BrianVideo]

I'm a video producer for the Regional Headquarters of the Adventist church in SouthEast Asia, and our administration has asked for me to check out the feasibility of live broadcasting via our intranet. Every workstation is connected via ethernet and we have a great deal of guests that arrive at the office, and we'd like the ability to broadcast what's happening in our auditorium to each workstation. I'm a relative novice on this side of video production and I'd appreciate any ideas anyone would have. What software/extra hardware would we need, what would be traffic concerns, and what's the honest feasibility of this? Our ethernet is 10BaseT.

 

[remix]

hi.

Have you tried Videoconference.


Stelios

 

[XoverIP]

are you going over a public network (WAN)? I am assuming not, because you said intranet. A couple of things you would want to look at...

PROTOCOL- If running syncronised audio/video...you are dealing with time sensative 'data' w/little tolerance for delay. Packets that arrive 'late' might be of no use because they need to arrive in proper sequence. I would reccomed a connectionless protocol...like UDP/IP. This will result in less overhead [in the packets] so they can get processed faster.

BANDWITDH- It can require a considerable amount of BW to support said traffic. 10M Ether should work perfect IF THE WORKSTATIONS ARE ON A SWITCH OR BRIDGE. That usually allows for full-duplex Ether configuration that results in 20M BW (you get 2X the BW if running full-dup). If these workstations are tied to, lets say, a 24 port hub, you might have great performance IF THE WORKSTATIONS ARE NOT GENERATING ANY TRAFFIC, that is, they are watching the presentation, not surfing the I-net.

 

[wybnormal]

Dont kid yourself.. the switch is required but 10meg is not going to do it. You need to be on 100meg swithed. Live video broadcasting is very expensive as you need to process and covert the video feeds in realtime, this takes serious horsepower. If you want to compress the streams, you lose the realtime hence the larger pipes are needed. Something else that will drive this is the size of video you want to display, the bigger it is, the more bandwidth it needs and the little bitty window that many online streams use wont cut it for what you want.

There are several digital movie mags out on the newstands. I would find them and start researching. Talk with RealAudio for starters.. not that they are the best but they are a good resource. Hit the newsgroups and see what is being posted.

Do your math to find out just how much bandwidth you need. Start there first, not with what you have now. Set a lower limit of acceptable quality and if it still wont work with your current network, decide then to either upgrade or dump the project.

Mike S