Streaming Questions

Educate me please. How does it work?

The reason I ask is because I noticed one thing last night. I tried a big band stream last night and noticed something about it. This stream has a welcome greeting when you tune in, a short message before the music starts. I left my parcel and came back and heard this welcome again. The welcome greeting played everytime I left and came back.

If I am on the lot, already listening beyond the welcome intro, will new people to my lot hear the same initial welcome?

Does it stream if no one is there to hear it? Is it hard on the sim if you leave a stream playing unattended? Is it harder on the sim if 20 people are listening?

Is there a reason a stream may not want you to stream their URL in SL? Is there an ideal bitrate to look for, do higher/lower ones effect user lag while on my plot?

I been enjoying looking for different streams to play, just trying to understand it all. Thanks for taking the time to explain it if you choose to do so.

If whichever service you are using works like most others, here is what is happening.

All SL is doing when you enter a sound enhanced parcel is initiating an HTTP request to the sound server which says please forward your stream to <your client machine's> IP address. SL accepts the stream and mixes it in with SLs client side sound module so that footsteps and typing noises, etc are all blended. But SL's servers don't participate in the transaction.

When you leave the parcel, the SL client closes the stream from the sound server. When you re-enter the parcel, that same HTTP request goes out. The sound server has no recollection of you and treats it as it did the first request. Most (radio-like) sound servers start with their station identification and then whatever their programming is.

Depending on how the sound server behaves, visitors to your parcel will first hear the station ID and then may hear the beginning of the radio program or may be dropped into the stream and hear synchronously with you. This all depends on the sound server and I don't know if there is a standard practice, but my best guess is that it is cheaper to send you all the same running program than to give everyone their own from-the-start playlist.

Hope that clarifies some.

Malachi is correct.

In theory the effect should be the same as if you ran streaming audio program in the background and changed streams to match whatever parcel you were standing on.

What the Second Life client is doing is acting as a streaming audio client for you and changing the streams as you change parcels - there should be no effect on sim performance.

However, streaming audio definatly does raise the amount of bandwith needed. We recommend at least a 700k+ bandwith internet connection to use streaming audio, which should be about what you need to run a streaming audio channel in a seperate program while Second Life is running. This means it is definatly possible to experience client side lag and packet loss with streaming audio if you are limited in bandwith.

So for your questions:

It shouldn't.

No, No, No - but it would be harder on the streaming audio server.

Servers with limited bandwith or limited connections may not enjoy your dance party and in the case of the latter not everyone at your party may be able to hear them. Lower bitrates use less bandwith. There is a known issue with mono streams, so stereo is the best, for now.