Hey George, Well, my thinking is: no matter how low you go - the Access Grid is not a fixed bandwidth system due to how it scales in terms of participation - unlike simple broadcasting where the receiving site just gets one fixed stream for audio and video. Then the onus is placed on the transmitting site(s), not the receiving site. For the Access Grid both it's positive feature as well as a negative feature with video and audio (and any other data) as you add participants with video and audio to "interact". It's simply a different model...
Having said that: I've conducted Access Grid events with sites that only had a T1 or two tied together by carefully orchestrating the video and audio to fit and still allow them to participate - but only since I literally conducted the event to that affect (everyone else muted except the site whose turn it was for Q&A, etc - only primary videos from each site, etc, etc,). In this type of event, I deliberately had people scale back their frame rates from 24 down to 15, bring down the quality settings except for the primary sites, etc. What could be useful here is to do this from a venue perspective: i.e. Actually have the venue server dictate the vic settings (max?) to have such a "location" for people to go for lower quality video (and audio) settings enforced. I would presume it's possible, as long as participants didn't manually tweak their vic settings afterwards (can't control that!). Generally these types of events push the need at those sites for more bandwidth and help overall by giving those sites justification (after the fact, the see the potential they're missing out on) to get that additional bandwidth. Solutions?: Could (which Jason may have referenced) the real solution in the "Access Grid Land" (as one presenter referred to the AG) would be to allow a low bandwidth site to "bridge" and pick only the stream/audio they want to receive what they can afford to receive. It's letting them choose what traffic that will be forwarded to them from a bridge would be ideal for those sites in terms of video and audio. Sure, they'll miss out on all the rest of the video - and there would be some questions about limiting the audio this way because they'll miss the interaction if they only hear one site... but it would help them I suppose. What do other sites do?: One thing I've noticed is some sites have gone to multiple solutions - a tiered solution with regards to technologies. As a major transmission/seminar/meeting point, one site will support ALL the technologies and transmit (and receive as applicable) each one, letting the recipients decide which they want to participate on. Thus: Access Grid, Polycom, Web/video/multicast/unicast video/audio all receivable but the receiving site decides which type to participate (or as I'm noticing, many just choose to receive and watch without participating) thus allowing the receiving site to decide what amount of interaction (with the Access Grid being the most and web/video viewing the least) and bandwidth to incur for an event. My 2 cents, John Q! -- John I. Quebedeaux, Jr.; Louisiana State University Computer Manager LBRN; 131 Life Sciences Bldg. e-mail: [email protected]; web: http://lbrn.lsu.edu phone: 225-578-0062 / fax: 225-578-2597 > From: George Estes <[email protected]> > Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2009 11:25:51 -0600 (CST) > To: ag-tech mailing list <[email protected]> > Subject: [AG-TECH] Better use of bandwidth in the AG > > Hello, > > Is anyone out there looking at video and audio codecs that use less > bandwidth than the current AG codecs? > I know it's not as glamorous a topic as HD codecs but there's a large > potential AG community out there that only has maybe a T1 connection. > One of our PI's has expressed interest in providing some funds toward > developing a "low bandwidth AG". > > Thanks, > George
