Via Alan Levine - NMC - The Technical Set up for the Event

    This came from an email from Dave Pentecost who emailed Alan re: technical setup.

    With Beth's help I got a nice summary of NMC's technical setups for streaming and "canned" audio and video. No clear solution for video streaming yet for the poor NPO as opposed to MacArthur, but a little more insight.

    Here's Alan Levine's response:

    The video stream was provided by the MacArthur people. I am sure they hired out for a big service. You can attach to a screen any video that QuickTime can play, so a canned movie, like the ones we made available during the week, are QT files addressed via the URL. For a streaming event, the host provides a special streaming URL that we attach to the land.

    You could do some amount of streaming using an Apple XServe and QuickTime broadcasting-- these are limited since each avatar accessing content in SL needs a sepearat connection, so you can run into bandwidth limitations-- this is why we use a outside streaming service for audio-- requests hit their network, not ours.

    We do have a streaming audio server hosted for us via Limelight Networks (they also serve all video links hosted from their network rather than our web server). We use WinAmp with ShoutCast for streaming from a PC or NiceCast for streaming from a Mac. We route an audio source (teleconference phone, or from an application like Skype) through these to our streaming server, which than handles individual requests.

    I have a general schematiic for our audio set up:
    www.gliffy.com/publish/1057183/L.jpg

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    Thanks to Alan Levine for that.

    As I told Alan, last week with my webmaster pal's help, I got a streaming server (icecast) and Mac client (Muse) working. It's the bandwidth limitations that call for the more expensive services.

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