On 16/12/2008, at 10:27 PM, Simon Blake wrote:
I don't know about Quicktime (I suspect it can), or Flash (I suspect it can't) but to multicast off a Windows media server you move from Windows Server 2008 Standard to Windows Server 2008 Enterprise or Datacentre, with the attendant increase in cost. So for many smaller deployments, you'd be balancing transit cost versus server cost, and the transit cost may be lower.
VLC can send multicast, but not sure if it can do WMA/WMV. I'm pulling in Newstalk ZB as WMA from StreamingNet and multicasting it around my network here as MP3. I'd assume it's possible to do WMA/ WMV without much effort, the cute menus don't have an option for it though. Not sure how to make Windows Media Player listen to it though. Quicktime requires an SDP in a file, WMP is probably the same.
I think there's also a perception that multicast is a solution to a diminishing problem. Most of the major broadcasters seem to be acknowledging that the end of appointment TV (and radio) is nigh [1]. If live content is ~40% of your volume and dropping, and you still need some kind of non-multicast infrastructure to deal with the on demand (individually time shifted) content you're dishing up, then why bother with the effort of setting up multiple platforms?
Yeah, valid point. I'm not entirely sure that broadcast content will disappear entirely though. Even if it does, there are other things that multicast would be useful for - RSS over multicast could be fun, for example. Poor example, as bandwidth requirements are really low. I like the idea of low bandwidth requirements at the source though - really lowers the barrier to entry. What about distributing Linux ISOs?
[1] I first heard this excellent phrase from the redoubtable Mr Macewen, I dunno if he spawned it or pilfered, but credit where credit is due, etc.
Brilliant! That sounds like a Hamish original to me. -- Nathan Ward