From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (DARRIN MIKE) Subject: Thoughts on setting up a streaming network Hello, I am in the very early stages of setting up streaming on our Intranet, and I just wanted to solicit some feedback to help me decide if I have a handle on all of this. I will eventually be streaming up to 4 concurrent streams at a fairly high frame rate. I have not decided what the frame rate will be, have not done any testing yet. The streams will always be "talking heads", with no background music or anything like that. It will be audio/video feeds of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. I don't know a great deal about the specifics of our network infrastructure, other than it will soon be a gigabit backbone (currently 16 bit token ring, but upgrading right after the 1st of the year), and we will be streaming via multicast (i.e., the network people know to set up the upgraded network thusly). I'm thinking that I will need 5 machines: 4 pretty powerful machines dedicated to encoding the individual streams and 1 machine running Real Server dedicated to serving the streams. Is it pretty much accepted that it is impossible to use 1 machine to encode more than one stream? I was reading that the Osprey 1000 card allows more than 1 RealProducer G2 video stream to be encoded on the same machine. From their documentation: > And you are no longer limited to encoding a single stream per > CPU. By installing multiple Osprey�-1000 cards, a > single computer can simultaneously encode multiple > RealNetworks RealSystem G2 video streams. (http://www.mmac.com/products/osprey/osprey1000.html) However, the documentation is not clear as to 1) whether it is possible to do likewise for multiple Windows Media video streams and 2) whether these are video-only multiple streams that can be encoded. I must have audio. Also, at this time, there are no plans to archive these streams for later playback. However, I feel that I must plan for this eventuality. I just have a feeling that the users are going to demand it once this all gets going. I am wondering how this would affect my setup. Would I have to buy a specific machine to have the encoding machines send the stream to for archiving? Can the encoding software send the archive stream to a remote machine, or must it store it locally while encoding? I guess I'd have to set up a procedure for manually moving the archive file each day to a machine specifically designed for serving the archive files. I can't help but wonder what high capacity sites, sites with very large numbers of archived files, do for storage. I really appreciate anyone's thoughts/experiences, Mike Darrin -- Michael S. Darrin Legislative Data Processing Center Pennsylvania General Assembly mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ******************************************************* The RealForum is an email discussion group focused on using RealNetworks products. The RealForum is a place to post messages about the best methods for creating content using RealNetworks technologies and the planning and implementation of streaming-media web sites. Archives of RealForum can be found at http://realforum.real.com If you ever want to remove yourself from this mailing list, you can send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the following command in the body of your email message: unsubscribe realforum or from another account, besides the address you subscribed with: unsubscribe realforum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
