RA/RV Feeds from RBN

Thu Feb 12 08:47:13 UTC 1998

### On Wed, 11 Feb 1998 09:14:06 -0800, Mark Hernandez <markh at repairnet.com>
### wrote to Matthew Petach <mpetach at netflight.com> concerning "Re: RA/RV
### Feeds from RBN":

MH> Matthew Petach wrote:
MH> 
MH> > > Jeffrey Payne, GM Broadcast Operations
MH> > > RealNetworks, Inc.
MH> >
MH> > As a representative of RealNetworks, do you have any comments
MH> > on the availability of source code to your player, for those
MH> > of us with multicast-supported systems you have chosen to
MH> > ignore?  Or is it simply time to declare NANOG yet another
MH> > bastion of closed minds, and closed protocols?
MH> 
MH> I would be happy if there was actual support for non-Intel/non-MMXprocessors,
MH> aside from Macintosh.
MH> 
MH> As it is, everything since their version 3 release has been "Error 88" in our
MH> office since they won't support these so-called 'orphan' CPUs.

Yes, I too found this to be incredibly annoying and I _am_ running an
Intel-based system.  However, I'm running BSD/OS on my laptop so the FreeBSD
binary of RealAudio-3.0 is the only thing I have available to me.  I don't
too much care about the video (it's usually useless even if it does work)
but when I tried to connect I got an error message telling me to upgrade my
client.  The problem is... there is no upgrade available.

A few of us decided to expiriment and set up an mbone tunnel with one person
sitting near the front with his laptop's mic enabled.  While the RBN feed
was giving people Error#14, some people got at least a little bit of our
mbone broadcast (it was faint and choppy someone reported on IRC).  However,
because of the way we had the tunnels set up, we were pegging the local
network with about 3000pps of traffic so we quickly abandoned it.  I have a
feeling that an mbone boadcast would have been more reliable and useful had
it been set up more properly.

Now, I believe that vat, rat, vic, and sd(r) are all available for every
major platform and every major OS out there (someone correct me on this if
I'm wrong) plus the source code is freely available.  However, I suppose
those without an mbone tunnel would lose out just as well.  Good thing I
could get a "live feed" since I was actually at the meeting. |8^)

--
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