Serious Threat to InWorld Videostreaming ?

Inworld videostreaming at a major dual-reality event was cancelled recently at the last moment after the organisers were advised that any accidental unrelated simcrash would also crash the videoservers due to too many reconnection attempts too close in time, when the sim came back up. And that the risk was too big to take.

If this is true it has huge implications for any other such future event.

Can the techies amongst us examine this hypothesis please, and either dismiss it as erroneous ( eg risking nothing more than the usual video slowdowns and temporary glitches) or come up with some guidelines on its circumvention in the future.

Since other discussion on this question elsewhere deteriorated into questions of personalities and motivations, can we please keep purely to the technicalities.


Here is a relevant response from Torley in the Answers Forum. She has slightly misunderstood, in that no-one is suggesting the sim crashes are caused by the videostreaming, but her comments on videoserver slowdowns under load, rather than crashes, are highly relevant, as is her reassurance that there is simply no problem.

Cross posted for the new discussion:

I'm not sure if "urgent resolution" (which you ask for in the other thread) is going to be possible. If Apple has yearly problems with it when they stream MacWorld, and CNN's video is constantly choppy and unreliable, how do you expect smaller outfits to make it glitch free and perfect?

The first thing that needs to happen to make it work is to get the simulators reliable to avoid the connection problem I've described over and over, not to mention to make it possible to WALK around on SL's estates again!

Once that is done, then streaming to smaller numbers (up to several hundred) shouldn't be too difficult. Trying to video stream on a larger scale than that? That's far beyond the typical know-how of anyone but the most expert level video streamers, and even they (see CNN or MacWorld for proof) have fairly big problems getting it to work in a glitch-free manner.

Regards,

-Flip

PS - as to my tech credentials, I'm by no means a video expert, but I have an Ivy League degree in computer science, I'm head of tech for a fairly large company, I'm an Oracle certified developer and have been programming since age 5, and I understand the basics of how server daemons work in general.

PPS - Torley's reply is true, but not pertinent to the discussion, as I'm fairly sure she has no knowledge of the details of how Quicktime video streaming work. If you're really that concerned, and don't believe me, why don't you write to Apple and ask? Torley failed to address the most important part: would 100 people reconnecting to a video stream simultaneously (or within a few seconds) cause the entire server to crash or stall? The answer to THAT question is YES. It won't be as major a concern once the major bug affecting SL's estates is fixed, as I've been saying all along. I don't see why that's so hard to accept.

Ok first off, we have already determined that this problem does not exist. There is some issues with estate land, however it is in no way related to, nor could it possibly be related to streaming media on the estates due to the way that SL handles media streams. The e-mail that was sent to estate owners never once mentions media as having anything to do with the issue.

Now since a bug relating to media streams and estates doesn't exist, you stated "Once that is done, then streaming to smaller numbers (up to several hundred) shouldn't be too difficult." Yay! We have no problem then. 4 sims = max 160 people.

Problem solved \o/

I like this guy. -----> FlipperPA Peregrine.


*waves at Khamon.