Streaming the Inauguration

[jburgin81]

Good afternoon all,

 

I'm a technician for a 16 school county. Our admins just brought us the daunting task of making sure each school has the available resources to watch the President Inauguration on Jan 20th. This might not be a problem at most schools, because the majority have Comcast cable run to their schools and deployed via distribution systems to regular TV's.

 

However, we have a few special cases. One school runs a IP based TV solution (SageTV) that streams TV to their classrooms through a client program. The software works, but will buckle under a heavy load (ie: all 80+ classrooms viewing the same channel at the same time)./

 

My boss and I are trying to look at other solutions. We're assuming that most schools might like to watch it over the internet too. We currently have video playing blocked by our firewall, but might open this up for that. This of course could bog down our network, and we're trying to ensure that there's a good viewing experience all around.

 

I just like to get some feedback on our fellow IT Educators out there on steps they're taking to make sure that all schools are able to watch the inauguration in the best fashion. (the less lockups the better).

 

Are you allowing your schools to stream from the internet or are you trying to buffer the video stream and then deploy it locally to save your bandwidth?

 

Look forward to hearing from you.

[DrPerceptron]

There's an idea.... what time is it?

 

There are quite a number of different solutions out there, only one I can think of off the top of my head (and it's free!) - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/server/server.aspx

 

If you can get the direct link to the stream, you can setup Windows Media Services to pull the stream and then get all 80+ classrooms to connect your WMS box's stream.

 

WMS has a Load Simulator feature, so you can see how well your box will cope with 80 connections to it, ours is running borderline minimum spec and will happily handle 35 video and 3 audio streams.

[jburgin81]

The inauguration is on Tuesday at 11:30am according to the news outlets. I think getting the direct link to the stream would be the problem. Do you have any resources about setting up Windows Media Services? Streaming video isn't my strong point

 

And thanks for the response

[CyberNerd]

We have a mythtv setup for teachers to record TV stations using a tvcard.

They login to a web frontend (mythweb) and select the programs that they want to pre-record. they can then stream the programs to their classrooms (VLC).

We've not enabled live TV streaming, but it's esy to do with this plugin for mythweb

MythStreamTV - MythTV

[DrPerceptron]

WMS is pretty easy to set up, just install it and that's actually about it. Most of the info is on the Microsoft site or in TechNet.

 

Obtaining the streams is the slightly harder part, whether the properties of it will provide you with the streaming URL, but then it also depends on what they stream it in, Windows Media format is the easiest (obviously)... and that's all I've tried with it

[k-strider]

you could pick up the stream on another PC with a TV card, providing Windows Media Encoder will grab the stream from the TV card.. this is how we broadcast Sky News and BBC News 24 around our School... then you can push or pull that the the Windows Media Server

[jburgin81]

you could pick up the stream on another PC with a TV card, providing Windows Media Encoder will grab the stream from the TV card.. this is how we broadcast Sky News and BBC News 24 around our School... then you can push or pull that the the Windows Media Server

 

This is actually our intention. We have a SageTV Server with 3 tuners (6 total) streaming Comcast cable to a school. Our concept so far is to take the mpeg file that SageTV will dump to and streaming that, using either WMS or VLC (my boss wants me to test the VLC part, he thinks it would work well)

 

We'll also have to spread it out amongst several servers in the county, so we can be sure we spread out the bandwidth this would take up. Either way, we're on the right track. If we can't find direct links, that's our way to go I guess.

 

Thanks for you all your responses.

[goaliepride]

has anyone found a link to a stream to use with something like VLC?

[jburgin81]

There's an idea.... what time is it?

 

There are quite a number of different solutions out there, only one I can think of off the top of my head (and it's free!) - Windows Media Services

 

If you can get the direct link to the stream, you can setup Windows Media Services to pull the stream and then get all 80+ classrooms to connect your WMS box's stream.

 

WMS has a Load Simulator feature, so you can see how well your box will cope with 80 connections to it, ours is running borderline minimum spec and will happily handle 35 video and 3 audio streams.

 

 

I just wanted to update you and say Thanks for the advice regarding WMS. We were able to implement a system to capture a Cable stream of C-SPAN through Windows Encoder, then push that to a server, then chain 7 more servers to share the stream. We were able to have a total of 376 clients (135 on one server alone) connect this morning to view the inauguration. It was extremely easy as there no codecs to install or last minute programs to push out. It was a simple as sending out an email with a link to their assigned server and Windows Media Player did the rest.

 

So thank you! We're going to keep this implementation active for future broadcasts!

[DrPerceptron]

Glad it went well =D

 

I totally forgot about it personally