[NBLUG/talk] KSUN @ SSU

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 08:43:24PM -0800, augie wrote:
> i've stated publicly before in the "SSU Star" that ksun should get
> away from live365 and do their streaming in house. such a solution
> would give ksun full control, finacially and otherwise. this also
> leads to my next point...

There's existing free software out there for doing this kind of thing, too. 
http://www.icecast.org/ for instance.

(yes, yes, I suppose realmedia has their streaming audio server to their
realplayer client, too, but that tends to (a) cost money and (b) inevitably
annoy the hell out of you)

Keep the 33K feed in addition to higher-quality options, like 56K and/or
112K.  That way modem users with their 56K modem that actually only gets 44K
on good days can have a chance at listening, while people with faster
connections will get higher quality.  (those rates are approximations of
what a 64Kbit or 128Kbit connection can handle with overhead, catching up
after packet delays, etc.) Maybe a 192K stream for on-campus folks only?

Basic math:
10Mbit ether card gets 5Mbit == ~40 128Kbit streams.  (or 80 64Kbit streams)
40Mbit outgoing T3 == ~320 128Kbit streams.  (or 160*128K+320*64K)
100Mbit card straight to switch == ~800 128Kbit streams.

Which all means that in an ideal world you have a reasonably beefy machine
(should be able to run 2-4 mp3 encodings in real-time) with a reasonably beefy
connection (bug the networking folks for your own switch port, IOW).  I
understand this can also be done via 2 (or more) totally separate machines:
one to handle the streaming, another to handle the encoding.

Also, in an ideal world, you want this machine in the studio with a
good-quality audio feed going into its sound card.  Theoretically somebody
could pick up the signal from elsewhere and rebroadcast it over the net, but
that would introduce noise.

If there's some way to dig up some hardware (or repurpose hardware), I'll
bet there's some NBLUG folks that'd be willing to help out on the software
end.  I think I might know somebody that's been doing some streaming audio
whose brain I could pick a slight bit about it, too...

(I used to listen to KSUN a lot about, oh, say, a decade ago or so.  I think
I still have the T-shirt to prove it, even.  Didn't know that there was an
online stream of it now, though.)
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder & President Pro Tempore for Life
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at freenode, AIM: falschfreiheit, ICQ: 48217244
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