bem003us
12-09-2005, 05:42 PM
First thanks for any help and suggestions, please bear with me... I've been assigned to come up with a solution to stream the campus radio over the web. I've done some research and I successfully educated/confused myself (probably more of the latter). I've been told that we have a 15 megabit uplink and the environment is primarily windows. I plan to use windows media encoder/media services 9 enterprise to keep things simple (free mac client). Should I stream the radio as an MBR (multiple bit rate) unicast, or a pair of (hi/lo) bandwidth multicasts? (I was leaning towards the multicast, but I've heard network issues may arrise with routers/switches and multicast). Also I was hoping to stream the broadcasts at 56kbps (hi) and 24kbps (lo); I conservatively figure that would support 215 (hi) or 500 (lo) non-local simultaneous connections. I'm not sure that would be enough, and I was wondering if you could also suggest some streaming media providers/hosts in the even that I may need the extra bandwidth. I was also planning on recommending the purchase of 2 machines for encoding (unless I can use the same machine reliably to encode 2 multicast streams at different bit-rates hopefully with the same sound card) and a pretty powerful streaming server to stream the radio (if we have enough bandwidth) and possibly stream other events in the future. Please let me know if I'm on the right track, or if I'm crazy or something. Thanks.
Also I was looking into flash streaming as well, but I'm not sure if it would have any advantages over streaming with windows media, and would it be difficult to implement and allow for controls embeded in a child "pop-up" window with news and advertisements. :confused:
Also I was looking into flash streaming as well, but I'm not sure if it would have any advantages over streaming with windows media, and would it be difficult to implement and allow for controls embeded in a child "pop-up" window with news and advertisements. :confused: