Christoph, I think the demo would be good to see. I agree with your thought there - until there is such thing as more bandwidth than we can fill up there will be sites with constraints and the ability to choose which versions of which streams (high vs low resolution/high vs low bandwidth) having those choices is a good thing.
To address having multiple versions of streams and sites not having the bandwidth, break them up into different groups (multicast addresses). Say, you only want the h261 streams - that's one group. DV... HD... HDV other groups. You only "get" a group if you "connect" to it... etc. of course, then we start actually using groups! and then we're back to the issue of multicasting. That's still a problematic issue in my state, but i'm chipping away at it. With all the video being tossed around these days, i have to think even regular ISP's are thinking multicast thoughts... no? I notice this camera has, like you say, many outputs available to it. Looking forward to the Retreat - i've been encouraging attendance from those projects and group in my state, the Access Grid is becoming more "visible" and discussed as a way to enable and do collaboration but lately the ability to do HD at the same time is foremost in everyone's request. For me, besides the cost, it's the ability to just "make it work" and the realization that I'm now using projectors that are 4-5 years old and folks don't seem to understand that resolution and screen "space" are two different things. The ability to scale video to any size (and save/store those settings as well - etc) would be ideal.... i've always pointed out how flexible the AG ultimately is because it is a toolkit. -John Q. -- John I. Quebedeaux, Jr.; Louisiana State University Computer Manager LBRN; 131 Life Sciences Bldg. e-mail: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; web: http://lbrn.lsu.edu phone: 225-578-0062 / fax: 225-578-2597 On Mar 8, 2007, at 10:23 PM, Christoph Willing wrote: On 09/03/2007, at 3:49 AM, John I Quebedeaux Jr wrote: Someone asked me about this camera for HD use on the AG: http://www.picturephone.com/products/sony_evi_hd1.htm Anyone have any experience with it? I'm wondering if it was used, how to best "capture" it into a system for use on the AG... interest in using HD is high here. I'm more concerned about logistical issues with high resolution images on displays that don't have that much "resolution" space - particularly if several sites are involved. John, With regard to screen space logistics, we've developed a version of vic that does DV and HDV - full details and perhaps a demo at the forthcoming AG Retreat. One of the changes is the ability to resize the video window(s) to any size you like. Thus you could accomodate several streams at smaller than true HD size when display space becomes tight. BTW, I think that when DV, HDV, HD are all more common in the AG, best practice will be to always send those formats as duplicates of standard H261 streams so that other sites can choose to view their own preferred mix of H261 and higher resolution formats (somewhat avoiding the screen real estate problem you raised, not to mention bandwidth issues). The cameras we've been testing with have a number of simultaneous outputs available so its trivial to send both DV/HDV and H261 at the same time. chris Christoph Willing +61 7 3365 8350 QCIF Access Grid Manager University of Queensland
