From: Ed Garay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: mpeg vs surestream
Also note that the minimum MPEG-1 bit-rate starts at 1.25Mbps,
or 1.5Mbps, as most MPEG purists would argue.
So, at least for the time being, forget MPEG streaming over the
commodity (aka public, standard) Internet. As Dan implies, higher
bandwidth streaming is possible on Intranets, especially if your
organization uses switched Ethernet, switch FastEthernet or ATM.
Large universities like ours (UIC) also have access to high-bandwidth
networks like Internet 2, vBNS and Abeline, so 1.5Mbps, 6Mbps (MPEG-2),
30Mbps, 150Mbps or higher is not a problem for us. :-)
For regular LANs and commodity Internet applications, I push our streams
as high as 400Kbps. They seem to work well everywhere on campus, even
on floors with conventional shared Ethernet subnetworks. Surprisingly,
the commodity Internet connection between UIC and my home cablemodem
can also sustain the 400Kbps connection. As an example, see Hillary
Clinton off our server at http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/itl/statedept/
Btw, to stream MPEG via a RealMedia server, you also need to purchase
an MPEG server plug-in, from bitCasting; it is not cheap, unfortunately.
--- Ed Garay
University of Illinois at Chicago
UIC Instructional Technology Lab
From: "Seoane, Dan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: RE: mpeg vs surestream
Hardikar, In a few words or less.
MPEG is great at streaming when you have reserved or guaranteed
bandwidth
like on a private, or corporate LAN but falls short when you are trying to
stream over the public internet. The internet is so unpredictable that it
helps to have a method of being able to dynamically shift (reduce or
increase) the streams rate without effecting stopping and restarting the
stream. Surestream is the only technology that has been able to get this
right so far. The one thing that I do not care for is the amount of
overhead
associated with the Surestream file. For every bitrate you choose is
combined into 1 large stream. When I do a live stream and choose
everything
from 80Kbps on down my actual bandwidth being used from the encoder
to the
server is around 280Kbps. I also like the fact that I can encode 1 file and
all my users have access to that file at no matter what connection speed
they have. I have users in Europe that can only get 20kbps from their
dial-up but they are still able to get my streams. Hope this helps some.
-d
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