[Spread-users] Spread Newbie: Video and audio possible with spread?

Ned Konz ned at bike-nomad.com
Wed Jan 7 13:55:34 EST 2004


On Wednesday 07 January 2004 9:04 am, Chatter Box wrote:

> Having been recently introduced to spread, I am wondering if anyone can
> help with the ff questions:
>
> 1). Is it possible to use spread to stream video and audio ?
>   - If the answer to video streaming is yes, could someone please explain
> how this can be done or point me to a URL for more info ? (an example will
> be nicer still! ;o)  )

Sure, why not? Spread can provide guaranteed, ordered delivery of messages to 
clients. What those messages contain is up to you.

Since I can do (for instance)

	cat someFile.mpg | mplayer -

and play a movie through a pipe, I could do it with Spread.

The quick test for this would be to make a program that does nothing but join 
a group and stream all message content to its standard output. Then you could 
test it:

	myProgram GROUPNAME | mplayer -

You may have to use some mplayer options to set the buffering size.

> 2). I reckon the 100k data payload size may be a problem?, what about just
> "hacking" the #define in the approp. header file (I think I remember
> reading somewhere that its not safe to do so).

I'd try just sending sub-100K chunks of a stream and see how it behaved.

I don't believe that Spread has any knobs to turn for guaranteeing quality of 
service/latency, so you may either have to use lots of buffering or rely on 
having a much faster network than your bitrate.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE




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