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Summer of Code/2009/Multimedia-broadcasting (view source)
Revision as of 20:29, 11 April 2009
, 20:29, 11 April 2009added contingency plan
Since sugar-chat-activity uses Python, I will likely be using it for this project as well. The GStreamer libraries will be used for communicating with the Icecast server and uploading multimedia. Ogg will probably be used as the container, Theora will be used as the video codec, and Vorbis will be used as the audio codec, since this is a relatively well-supported combination (supported for in-browser playback on upcoming browsers) and poses no licensing issues, though thanks to the flexibility of GStreamer any other supported codecs and container could alternatively be used. As XOs do not apparently have enough cpu power to encode Theora video live at acceptable resolution and framerates, older, less cpu-intensive codecs, such as MPEG-1, MJPEG, or H.261 may be used as video codecs instead.
Since sugar-chat-activity uses Python, I will likely be using it for this project as well. The GStreamer libraries will be used for communicating with the Icecast server and uploading multimedia. Ogg will probably be used as the container, Theora will be used as the video codec, and Vorbis will be used as the audio codec, since this is a relatively well-supported combination (supported for in-browser playback on upcoming browsers) and poses no licensing issues, though thanks to the flexibility of GStreamer any other supported codecs and container could alternatively be used. As XOs do not apparently have enough cpu power to encode Theora video live at acceptable resolution and framerates, older, less cpu-intensive codecs, such as MPEG-1, MJPEG, or H.261 may be used as video codecs instead.
'''Contingency Plan'''
Discussions on the mailing list have made it clear that full-motion video broadcasting over a wireless network to a large classroom, either via unicast or multicast, is going to be a very difficult technical challenge. Potential solutions to this are listed under "Addressing Bandwidth Issues". Should all of this nevertheless run into technical issues that prevent large-scale broadcasting of full-motion video due to bandwidth and airtime issues, this activity could still be a useful means to broadcast lecture slides, which require much lower framerates and bandwidth and are thus less likely to run into bandwidth issues, or perhaps for small-scale audio and video broadcasting (aka one-to-one video conferencing).
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