Re: FW: <nettime> Open Source Streaming Alliance

["Matthew Smith" <matt@fl.aec.at>]

>Plus the underlying transport technology requires an incredible amount of
>implementational sophistication to scale to large audiences effectively.
>This is why RBN charges so much, eh?  And it may be an oversimplification
>to say that Real uses proprietary technology.  They use the open RTSP
>standard,
>a la Quicktime, and it's an RFC-approved standard.

RBN charges so much because they can. If development time and performance
were a factor in the pricing, how could they have offered the RN 5.0
server at 500$ about 3 years ago? The comparable server now costs 2000$.
And how can apple offer the QT server for free?


>And MP3 decoding is processor-intensive.  even more so for MPEG-standard
>video.  my 450MHz Pentium gags on MPEG.  So the day of Palm OS decodes of
>MP3/MPEG is a ways off...even then, seems to me that the current wireless
>trends for Palm won't support A/V-capable bandwidth for years.  

well, firstgen. PPC macs (61/71/8100) can easily decode mp3s, under linux
u can even listen to them on a 486. we here at FirstFloor are
experimenting with embedding various control signals in mp3 streams, and
the main reason why we use mp3 is, as our resident coder says, because it
is "the (VW) Beetle of audio codecs" - its free, its stable and its
hardware requirements are reasonable. its bandwidth usage is scalable, and
the low-end is also improvable.

also, u might want to check out http://www.handspring.com/ for a viable
path to get PDAs into the A/V world...

on last thing...when u use a fone, u listen AND broadcast at the same
time, no? so your argument about everybody broadcasting and not listening
seems a little naive (if not even lame), especially since that is a big
part of the appeal and the goals involved in this effort to get people to
overcome the oneway-media-paradigm, which was enforced in the dawn of 
broadcast media, such as the radio & TV, by choice of the governments of
the 30ties....read up on your media history, take a close look at your
broadcast RECIEVERs (TV,radio, in case ur wondering wtf im talking about)
and give me one good reason why they rnt TRANSMITTERs aswell....

takeitezy
matt




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