Wireless Multicast TV... after

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.

Here are some short clips of out team doing some carpentering work in order to prepare the room:

As mentioned, I worked on the proxy server we used to re-encode and stream Internet TV contents via multicast and thus had the “pleasure” to delve into Internet TV APIs and the innards of GStreamer. Given some time, I'd like to post some stuff about it in the near future.

Anyway, the experiment worked perfectly in the end and we were able to stream multiple full HD videos to every one of the 10 clients over a wireless connection that peaked at 12 Mbps more or less. Here are the results, commented in Italian: