My experience with Darwin Streaming Server and MPEGable

Like may of you I was excited about getting streaming video working on my property. I also found an apparent shortage of offerings for renting streaming video servers and thought I would give it a go myself.

I setup a Darwin Streaming Video Server on a dedicated machine, and MPEGable Broadcaster on a separate machine. Playing .MOV and .MP4 files from the server was fairly simple. Setting up MPEGable broadcaster took a little more work, but I was finally able to broadcast live video from my webcam (with sound) and also able to stream video from my VHS/DVD player into SL. The quality seemed very good, at least when watching by myself. Last night I decided to put it to the test with multiple viewers.

(Yes, I am the one who posted an event advertising a copyrighted movie). I had a DVD laying around and was anxious to test streaming into SL. So I posted an event and assembled approximately 15 - 20 people on my land. Of these, most were not confiured properly to view video, but my streaming server did show 5 - 7 users actually connected and recieving streams.

I am no expert at bandwidth considerations, and went into this uneducated, but willing to give it a shot. I have a cable connection and testing shows throughput of about 2 megs. My Streaming server showed ME with a bitrate of about 510 kbps, and 4 or 5 others with bitrates ranging from 18 - 70 kbps. Needless to say, they were quite disappointed. Seeing as I was only 1 hop away from the server, I decided to turn my stream off. At that point several of the other viewers jumped to over 100kbps, but viewing was still extremely choppy and audio was dropping in and out. I had the bitrate on the broadcaster set at 200kbps. In the end, the shoing was a flop and was cancelled shortly after it started.

Some have suggested that I might be able to tweak my network and bitrates for broadcasting, and that may be true. But for the amateur like myself, I just wanted to share my findings up to this point. If I uncover anything new, I will let you know.

(and thanks to those who came to help out last night)

Since that question was posted under Linden Hotline, I couldn't point out that showing a movie you own without charging for it to a group of people falls under fair use. You know, that law that keeps teachers from going to jail for playing movies in class. And you are allowed to own a back up copy of any DVD you own which makes me wonder how that guy accused you of infringing on copyrights.

I couldn't respond either. But I do not intend to make it a practice without further knowledge of the legal implications. I thought it was a good choice for evaluating the quality of the stream in SL, and frankly just wanted to see if it could be done. The same setup could be used to broadcast the 300+ channels of DishNetwork into SecondLife too. I am not condoning the practice, but the public offerings available right now leave a LOT to be desired.

This argument isn't one that works for SL. I'm sure someone will reply saying why it does using RL example comparisons to SL but even if it was all true, it still violates SL's updated TOS.

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I made the post in the Linden Hotline section because I don't want to see the new video features become synonymous with pirated movies. I'd much rather see SL's video features known for helping independent film makers and animators get some in-game publicity. If the attitude becomes shared that video is only useful for putting on private land and inviting a few friends over to watch a private showing, it's not a very ground break use of the system.

It's proven people enjoy watching illegal movies for free, what's the challenge of proving that in 3D?

I wonder if multicast can be a solution to head-end bandwidth limitations?

The Sort Version: Multicast sends one packet out, and it gets split out into duplicate packets as it gets closer to its destinations. The first part (out form server to national backbones) it lives as a multiply-addressed single chunk of data.

I know that a year or two ago, many of the larger ISPs could not handle multicast packets, Comcast being the one I remember (as I use them). But at least for the cable companies, they are starting to send out video programming on multicast themselves instead of analog signals... So things may be looking up for multicast transmissions.

I have no clue how to stream one way over the other, however.

Hmmm, good point Tiger, I didn't know it could work that way. I'm thinking companies would not like that... From what you are telling is that I could stream EX a 3min video for 30 megs to 20 people from ss.net and still only use up 30 megs of bandwidth.

Multicasting will always be banned on larger ISP's (hell even smaller ones too) due to the ease at which you can soak bandwidth.

The real solution to this problem at the moment, is to find some decend dedicated hosting for this.

There's two places I recommend at the moment for this:
- If you have the hardware already, Empyrean Hosting have some (slightly expensive, but availible in low volume) colocation which is ideal for this.
- If you dont have the hardware, I've been impressed a lot with 1and1hosting; who apart from long support queues and major issues with dealing with international customers have provided a great service at a good price. (decent bandwidth, uptime, and provided hardware)

Make sure to give yourself plenty of bandwidth room if you decide to start hosting video seriously; because a lot of places begin to charge in the order of US$1/gb after you break your initial quota, which can add up very quickly.

-Adam