Posts tagged "Events"

The Wireless Multicast TV event has been a success, everything worked correctly (even exceeding our initial expectations in fact). We used the following setup during the presentation:

Our objective was to get real time Web TV contents from the Internet and stream them locally to a certain number of clients using multicast over a wireless network. The incoming media resources from the Internet were handled by our proxy server (the box I worked on prevalently), re-encoded and then streamed to multicast addresses. The inner network was a wireless link, composed by one antenna linked to 10 CPEs. Each CPE was then cabled to a client computer, playing back the video streams.

The main point of the experiment being that, since multicast can be very cheap if implemented on a wireless network, it can be successfully used to deliver real time media without incurring in the typical bandwidth saturation that would be caused by using unicast streaming.

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I've been working at the University of Urbino for a couple of months, trying to get a working example of a Web TV over a wireless multicast transmission channel. All of the team's efforts (me and a couple of other people) are focused on the public event of tomorrow:

We will try to demo a proxy server (which has been built primarily by myself using ASP.NET and GStreamer) that receives various Web TVs from the Internet (our partners for the event are StreamIt and the italian RAI) and 1080p high definition movies stored locally on the server, transcodes the A/V stream and forwards it via multicast.

The multicast stream will then cross a radio link (provided by our partners at Essentia) and get to 10 client PCs, representing 10 households that might wish to receive TV contents through their wireless connection.

Essentially the demo will try to prove that such transmission methods provide much lower impact on the available bandwidth (which can be very scarce on metropolitan wireless connections, especially if shared between many clients of the same household). Wireless multicast TV is usually limited to “traditional” media delivery similar to that of the standard TV broadcast (that is, no on-demand video), but could be integrated with some innovative commercial solutions (for instance, on-demand video that gets cheaper as more users decide to watch it).

If everything works as planned (and so far it didn't ), starting tomorrow I'll have more time to write about the things we worked on: lots of stuff, starting with the RTMP protocol, GStreamer, RTP multicast streaming...