Re: Wanting to set up live internet video stream - please advise

From: Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media] (neil_at_nospam.com)
Date: 07/20/04 

Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 22:57:18 GMT

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 12:48:03 -0700, "Sopwith"
<Sopwith@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>Neil,
>Thank you for the quick reply. I do not believe the MBone will be an option for us.

OK

>So if I read your post correctly, we should use a dedicated computer for WMEncoding and probably two cameras...a simple web cam for the live broadcast and maybe use our DV camera for the archive and an editable video.

Thats an option, if you can afford it, yes. 1/2 decent webcams might
come in at $25-50. Though record your sound through your sound desk if
you have one, and then to the encoding computer : Built-in (webcam)
microphones are rubbish.

>Is there a recommended OS for running the WMEncoder?

Not really, though I think for stability you'd need at least windows
2000. I don't *think* the encoder runs on OS before that (although it
might work on WinME at a push, I can't be sure about that as I've not
tried it). I could check out the specs in a spare moment (or you could
;-)

>Without access to the MBone we will serve the live videos via HTTP or the more efficient UDP protocol and the number of connected users will be limited by the upstream bandwidth.

Thats true to say. Live would be http streams (eg
http://your.ip.com:broadcastpurtnumber) and then you could run the
archived files on demand from a media server (eg
mms://your.2ndip.com/service-date-time/ )

>To serve these live we need Windows Server 2003 DATACENTER or ENTERPRISE? The regular Server 2003 Standard, 2003 Small Business, and 2003 Web versions cannot steam the video live correct?

Actually I'm not sure about standard ... but definitely not web or
small business server 2003.

Also ... if your ISP was happy enough with this, you could possibly
archive them on a web server instead and let the ISP's bandwidth take
the strain - thus saving the cost of WM Server licences in perprtuity
;-) It would depend on the size of the files, and they would cease to
be seekable (so they would have to be played end to end). It's an
option.

>Since the audio portion is much more critical than the video portion, can the live stream be somehow biased towords the audio?

Yes, by using a constant bitrate for audio you can pretty much reserve
that bandwidth, although rebuffering will start if there is still not
enough bandwidth at either end.

>If I install 2 pc's with the respective WME and WMS and fixed IP addresses, is everything fairly straight forward to run, or is there a lot of other configurationan and administrattion?

Make sure you speak to people who are knowledgeable about security and
networking. Your ISP may be able to provide some help in this regard.

>We usually use a Netgear firewall router, will all of this work behind the router if the proper ports are forwarded to the WMS server?

I can't see why not. I think you'll need port 1755 for mms, both UDP
and TCP. The http broadcast (TCP only, direct from the encoder) is
configurable for which port to use when you set up the encoder - just
remember to save and mark as read-only the profile once you've
established succesful settings. You'll then need to tell the router
which port to forward to this machine.

>Thanks for your help.
>
>
>
>
>
>"Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media]" wrote:
>
>> Let me just stop you there and point out that unless you have a direct
>> connection or an ISP proxy onto the MBone (multimedia enabled internet
>> regions with support for multicast islands) you probably wont have
>> much luck doing this.
>>
>> You can read up about the MBone architecture here :
>> http://www.live.com/mbone/
>>
>> So the upshot is that your users must have ISPs who provide them with
>> access to a multicast island, which then rebroadcasts to them. You
>> don't have that level of control over things so you may be out of
>> luck.
>>
>> All is not completely lost, you may be able to squeeze 5 HTTP audio /
>> video streams at 40k out of a 256k connection with enough compression
>> and a small video size.
>>
>> The file archive is a good idea though - using windaz media encoder,
>> you can archive at the same time as you broadcast directly from the
>> encoder. But in some cases you might want to edit the file, so it
>> might be better to have 2 cameras, one for live encoding and one
>> simply to archive the uncompressed file for later editing.
>>
>> If you go down the WMS route, you'll be best to put it on a separate
>> machine, as the WME might lock the encoding machine solid depending on
>> the amount of video you're asking it to process. If you do spend the
>> $$$ on Win2003, you need Enterprise or Datacenter edition *not* web
>> edition as this doesn't have the WMS support.
>>
>> You might get a few extra streams out of the same connection on this
>> server. That's because it uses the mms protocol rather than the http
>> protocol. mms:// urls' can be connected as UDP streams, rather than
>> the TCP needed for http:// urls. UDP has a lower overhead for error
>> correction and you might get +20% more data out with a slight risk of
>> dropouts, although this is normally handled by the player
>>
>> HTH
>> Neil
>>
>>

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