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Streaming the Inauguration In a School?
Anonymous Teacher writes "I work in a small school in Washington and we are trying to prepare a way to watch the inauguration in 20 classrooms over a 1.5 T1. As our bandwidth severely limits the ability to individually stream to these rooms, is there an alternative to presenting it to the students? Are there any sites that offer a downloadable copy of the video quickly after the event that can be hosted locally or is reconfiguring the computers to use a proxy server the best solution?"
1. Gather all the students in an auditorium, gym or cafeteria 2. Set up a single PC with a projector 3. ????? 4. Profit!
Anybody want my mod points?
seriously... that's how we did it back in my day. While it isn't as sexy as modern computer tech, it just works.
Could be wrong, but can't VLC (VideoLanClient) do the trick?
Get it to recieve one copy of the stream, and then repeat it over the local network (assuming your local network has the bandwidth).
VLC might be an option.
VLC can play back from a file that another process is writing to. So if you can figure out how to write the incoming video stream to a network filesystem, each classroom could use VLC to playback that file and you would only have to worry about a delay buffer of a minute or two to ensure smooth playback.
While I have not tried it myself, VLC is also capable of rebroadcasting video. So if you can view the live stream directly with VLC, you can probably get that copy of VLC to multiplex it out to other VLC clients on other machines.
Download it with your server. Stream it using VLC. Yay!
This should be a no brainer, unless they don't have a gym for some reason.
It would probably be a lot easier to just project it in an auditorium and play it from youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/inauguration
That's what my school's doing.
It'll be broadcast free over the air. Give each classroom a TV. Why deal with the internet?
windows media services does exactly what you want
There's this invention called television. It allows for any number of viewing stations with no increase in bandwidth requirements. Pretty sexy 21st-century stuff.
...we don't get much bang for our education dollars? Something that is going to be broadcast on 97 different networks for free, and you need to go through who knows what effort to stream it? Do you have math classes at that school? Get some parents to volunteer to bring in a TV. If you want the kids to see it later, you don't think YouYube will be inundated with copies of it?
I can't believe this was posted. The teacher reads ./ but doesn't know about VLC? Sad. I suppose the teacher also doesn't know who Barack Hussein Obama II is really controlled by either. Lamer....
Don't blame me I voted for Ron Paul. :) /me ready for the flame.
I keep trying to get that to work on my system. Where in KDE can I start this and make it work? Otherwise, I will stick with VLC.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
An alternative way of presenting this? Simply tell them the America their parents knew has been killed by illogic, fluffy rhetoric, and masterful manipulation.
I'm Nikita Kruschev, and I approved this message.
P.S., Told you we'd bury you.
You shouldn't even need more bandwidth, if your local network is configured properly.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'd be very surprised if it isn't going to be on ALL the major TV networks. Use the right tool.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
...for Bush's inauguration! What's that you say? You didn't force all the kids to watch W's? In all seriousness though, why the big deal for Obama's inauguration? What makes it more significant than any other inauguration in the past? Did you guys broadcast Bush's or Clinton's?
Grab a Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro, and slap Linux on a laptop. Plug in, tune in a station with Kaffeine, and note it down. Then get VLC configured to multicast that channel to the classrooms.
No need to kill the T1, when you can get digital TV of it for free.
The only other way is to have VLC multicast a smaller stream that won't choke the T1.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
I am going to assume that you are talking about a T1 to the Internet and that you actually have at least 100MB switched network locally.
If this is the case, then you should be able to easily do what you need. I work for a school and I understand that you probably don't have TVs, but you do have a computer and a projector.
You need one over the air TV or cable connection. Where I live, one cable drop per school is provided for free to the district.
Take this feed and connect it to a video capture card in a computer running Windows XP. Download the Windows Media Encoder, it's free from Microsoft. Use this to encode your cable video source. I suggest C-SPAN, but it's up to you.
Use a single Windows 2003 server to host a Windows Media Service. This is a very lightweight service that can run on a server that is already in use for something else. Set your media server to pull the feed from the encoder.
Tell all of your classrooms to point to the media server. A single media server can easily handle 50 - 60 streams over a 100 MB/sec switched network.
The effect of all of this is that you don't need to use any of your ISP's Internet bandwidth at all. All of your streaming traffic would be local to your LAN.
Why do you have to ask? Just do what your school did for the past inaugurations. How did they show the inauguration 4, 8, 12, and 16 years ago?
Okay, now that many posters have recommended VLC (which I as well recommend for stream rebroadcasting), I have one final question.
Why does this need to be a live feed? Seriously, record the stream on a computer or bust out one of those ancient VHS tapes and record it. Then, show the kids the video the next day in their Social Studies/History classes. There's no reason to disrupt the school's daily flow for something that happens every four years.
Here is how I'd do it:
1) Buy a USB capture card that has known drivers for whatever windows server version is in use
2) Assume Windows Media Services can use this capture card and stream it to windows clients on your network.
3) ???
4) ???
My other thought would be to use like MythTV and then use it's streaming stuff. I'm pretty sure they have a web based client.
This is actually a pretty tricky question to be honest. Especially considering you have less than a week to set it up and test it!
Personally, I doubt you are going to be able to take a stream from the internet and "rebroadcast" it over your network. The only thing that would get you half way is CSPAN, who offers a stream using windows media player or real player. I somehow doubt you'll be able to stream from the big-boys like MSNBC, CNN or (shudder) FOX.
My hunch is you will be more happy with a capture card and streaming that.
Either way, this is a pretty large project. Good luck.
Because it is a historic moment in our time. That might be, oh, a *small* part of it, you think?
Back when I was in high school, they stopped classes to show the OJ verdict live on every TV in the school. I'd say in terms of importance, this is a bit more important and historic.
And the janitor had to come into every classroom and fiddle with our antique black and white televisions to watch that.
As title says, Real has a nice streaming server called Real Helix and a producer (tool that creates the stream and sends it to the server for other people to view from server) called Real Producer.
There is a free version for both Real Server and Real Producer Basic.
Here's the page:
http://www.realnetworks.com/products/free_trial.html.
I believe you're not allowed to use the software commercially. As you use it for school and for noncommercial purposes you should be fine.
It may also be worth to send an email to Real because they may have discounts for educational licenses.
Anyway, Real Producer is about 100$
You just have to install the server on any computer with good network card because that's the computer that all classrooms will download the stream from. Your stream will be about 200-300KB/s for each user but you can change it as you want, for better or lower quality.
You install Real Producer on a somewhat powerful (a Core2Duo will be enough) computer with a TV tuner. Start the software, select the tv tuner as video and audio input, configure where to upload the stream and the bitrate and you're all set.
There are tutorials to help you on Real's website.
I've done this broadcasting football games at 80+ people in a college dormitory, on a 100mbps network so it definitely works.
Another alternative (though I didn't test this) would be to use an open source Flash streaming server like Red5 ( http://osflash.org/red5 ) and use the free Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder 3 ( http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/flashmediaencoder/ ) to record and send the stream to the Flash server.
That was pretty cheap actually. Maybe the money for the SCO license has yet to appear on your credit card statement.
I am going to be doing this for our Board of Ed (6 schools) using a two bonded T1s. We are lucky that each school is connected via our own fiber network. So, here's what I'll be doing...
-VLC to a compatible feed (used the C-SPAN live feed as a test at 194kbps).
-Loaded it into VLC on a temporary server in a VLAN accessible by all clients.
-Set preferences to allow for maximum compatibility across client OS/players.
-Doing a little extended math, using 50% of a 1Gb connection, this setup can support about 2,500 clients. The net feed will only take a hit of one 194kb stream.
If you have the tech and resources why not use it to its somewhat full potential. VLC will do a multicast broadcast. Just use that if your network can support it.
If one person presses pause then it freezes for everybody!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Someone just needs to bring in a cheap 46" HDTV with a built in ATSC tuner and put the antenna next to the window. Now you get to watch at 1080i 15 Mbps MPEG-2 rather than a 1 Mbps stream from Hulu.
The same thing can be said about the office. You've got these high-rise buildings with large windows and you've got 20 people all trying to unicast the same 1 Mbps stream over the Internet bringing the whole office connection down.
My old high school: http://www.lahigh.org/apps/news/show_news.jsp?REC_ID=81795&id=0&rn=4855263
And the gathering everyone into a large area (gym, cafeteria), then projecting is probably the most suitable..?
If you are on a school network, you most likely have a proxy of some sort. The proxies I've worked with can proxy streaming media. (Websense and Bluecoat) I would have a chat with your networking department to see what you're proxy is capable of. Otherwise, turn on the radio or tv. You don't have to use the internet for delivery.
finally, our students are forced to line up to listen to our dear leader's speech. just like in communist countries.
Or the PA system? Do you really need to see a speach? Sure, everyone wants to be watching when another president gets shot, but the chances of that are slim.
Perhaps you could capture an AVI or MOV file from the live broadcast, burn or copy it to a bunch of cd's or memory sticks and deliver it to classes.
Yes, I'm suggesting a sneakernet.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Why don't you just do whatever you did to stream the inauguration 4 years ago? Oh, wait.
Seems to me if the inauguration was on Presidents Day in February (a national holiday), then schools wouldn't have to worry about streaming it. 8^D
Multicasting could have solved this problem. Too bad the MBONE died.
I'm sorry, no one cared when we had blacks ascend to prominent positions in govt eg. Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, etc. I guess this is the first person of color to ascend to high ranking office that the media and left approve of, therefore it's a big deal. Being black helped Obama during the election, period. The only people making a big deal of him being the first non-white president was the media and the left.
Let's face it. We're NOT excited about Barack Obama because he's biracial. We're excited about him because he can put words together into sentences without endless interregnums of ums, hems, and haws.
Look in to using FFmpeg(ffserver) to relay the stream to your classroom again if your network has the bandwidth to do it.
Also if you have a Apple server laying around it has a streaming server app that you can run to do the same thing.
As for the VLC idea I have done that one. I live in Colorado and I only have about a T1 for internet bandwidth as well so I told VLC to play and rebroadcast the stream to my other computers. FYI it took some tweaking with the setting to get it to work
This was exactly my thought.
It's special because he/she is black = racist
It's special because she is a woman = sexist
But it seems that racism is ok as long as it's reverse.
Hi, I'm a good ole boy from Alabama and I get called a racist--that is, racist against anyone who isn't white--all the time on the interwebs. So allow me to weigh in with my racist opinion. I am glad Obama got elected. Back in the 60s, or even the 80s, a black president was an impossible dream. Now today it is reality. This is certainly proof of how far we have come as a nation. This is a shining example for the world to see, at a time when America's image is somewhat tarnished. I'm happy that black folks, especially the old timers who saw real racism in past decades, now have something like this to stand up and be proud of. I'm glad that we had a record turnout this election and large numbers of people becoming interested in politics. It's good for the country. The story of a poor black kid growing up to be the president of the United States is very inspiring. It IS a big deal.
Pull the 'net video stream into 1 server and dump it into a shared file. Hopefully your school network has Ethernet, switches, routers, etc. Then let the classroom computers play from that file. The file acts as a buffer, but you should be able to be close to realtime. A well designed server (RAID 0, 5, 6, etc.) with lots of RAM and fast disks should have no problem with many clients.
Or use a solution mentioned above like VLC and class D IP (the m-bone) or any of many videoconferencing solutions.
This old fogy is getting a good laugh at the thread. Some (very few) have already touched on it, but what the hell is wrong with watching TV on a TV? Borrow someone's huge-ass plasma and set it up in a large classroom. You don't even need cable or satellite as the broadcast networks will be covering the inauguration stem-to-stern in beautiful 1080i HD.
But no, the parent is hellbound to do this via computer. (And most of the responses seem to be troubleshooting and spitballing the idea.) Why? Because it's "cool" or the latest thing? Because he has some anti-TV bias? Or because he's so caught up in that "it's newer, so it must be better" mentality and literally did not even think of good old broadcast TV?
Sometimes the best and most appropriate technology is the good ol' tried and true. There are many applications in life where previously existing and "old fashioned" solutions are good enough. (And much simpler.) Often it's also cheaper, and it's almost always a hell of a lot less convoluted and headache-inducing.
Alas, so many are caught up in this "newer must be better" mentality. And the companies who develop and more importantly sell the stuff feed the frenzy by insuring that there's always something new out there to shell out the big bucks for. Today's new, neat-o technological breakthrough will be "obsolete" next year (hell, maybe next month) and of course you are encouraged to upgrade or replace what you already have that still works perfectly well for the newest, biggest, fastest, sharpest, shiniest, coolest thing. Feel free. I sit here with my old computer, relatively tiny picture-tube TVs, $29 radio and CD player, books and printed newspapers, and enjoy the hell out of all of them with no diminishment of my quality of life because all of these things are "old-fashioned." And I laugh.
Now, turn down that music and get off my lawn, you whippersnappers...
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Setup a quick and dirty MythTV server with an analogue TV tuner and run live discs throughout the school.
Oh, right... you didn't stream the inauguration live.
They should be at school learning how to compete with the rest of the world, not sitting in front of a monitor watching this live.
It'll be on YouTube before they make it home from school.
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
I think too many people are over thinking the issue
http://xkcd.com/530/
Lovely a great point and I just spent all of my points marking up all of the Linux jokes in the British Navy thread.
The ability to speak does not make you intelligent. Now get out of here.
Honestly the only difference I ever saw between Palin and Obama is one is more articulate than the other.
With all the christian prayer that'll be going on at the inauguration, would this count as staff-sponsored captive-audience prayer in public school? Would be interesting to see in court ;)
Watch it on CNN.
Or, download it and UDP stream to your.sub.net.255.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
We are doing this in our school. We have a computer with Windows Media Encoder 7 hooked up to our satellite tuner with a Hauppauge hvr-1950 and it streams out over the internal network. We have tested it with 40 connections with no hiccups.
Hope that helps
I graduated HS in 96 from Arkansas. That was 93-96 in HS and 90-93 in junior high. We had what was called "channel one" almost daily from junior high to the end of HS. What the heck was channel one? About a 5-10 min news program aimed at kids and broadcast to schools through out the nation. They had about a 5 minute local segment where the local school could insert their daily news program if they wanted from the A/V kids if they wanted. I had the impression at the time that it was paid for by a grant or bond or something. Now if we had that in Arkansas back then, I'd assume that every one else had similar educational tools growing up.
If there was any content that the school wanted piped to every one, they'd make sure to tell the teachers and then they'd run it though the tv. They could centrally turn on the tvs play it and then turn them off. (It took effort of a teacher manually turning the things off if they wanted to do something during that period of time.)
I'd really be surprised that in 2008 that there are schools without those sorts of resources. Oh on commentary, what the heck do you think we did for the next 5 minutes after channel one was over? It was discuss/debate what ever the heck was running and wait for the teacher to quieten the room down. We learned more from each other and discussing than from the teacher at that point. The teachers generally thought that it was cutting into their class time and didn't want to waste any time discussing most of the content anyway. It was wait for lunch if you wanted to talk about it. Like we'd have really cared to bring it up by then any way. ;)
No other programming language has that kind of streaming video coverage. LOL.
Hulu.com is going to be broadcasting the inauguration. You can copy the embed code to put on a simple web page or blog at http://www.hulu.com/spotlight/obamapresidency .
Not very many more details are given, but there are other clips to watch if you're interested.
We got stuck in a similar issue with our schools. The cafetorium is scheduled for lunch at that time and doesn't have cable anyway. It also serves two different schools that are linked by the cafetorium. The only places that cable exists are in the libraries that can only sit about 30-50 kids each (grade level sizes are 130-150 per grade level and we are talking about 6 grade levels). Some grades wanted to watch live while others wanted to watch later in the day. I solved it with the new web server I was setting up. I am going to stream CSPAN over our network to classrooms with projectors. I am using Quicktime Broadcaster along with QTSS (This is what we're using. You might find an alternative that fits your system better). Quicktime Broadcaster will also record the event at the same time and we will have it available shortly afterwards as a streaming video. I chose CSPAN specifically because of their rebroadcasting rules. This allows us not only to broadcast it but also rebroadcast it for the high school the following week for class use since they have mid terms during the event. The sad thing is that these schools were going to have cable installed in each classroom but the school board at the time worried about students/teachers watching tv all day. On top of that, the newly negotiated cable franchisee they signed just last year included wording that the school/town needed to pay for any new cable installation beyond the one they already have installed. Since we just found out that are state isn't giving $421,000 of the expected subsidy we budgeted in for this fiscal school year, we are sort of in a budget freeze. Work with what you got!
Windows Media encoder (free as in beer from MS) receiving the stream and encoding, This can act as a limited streaming media server itself (though I do not know if it will handle 20 streams, most times, non production level MS products only handle 10 concurrent connections) but I believe it can encode and provide the data on demand to windows server with media extensions, which can handle it. Windows media player on the clients in the 20 classrooms to watch. I am sure you have at least one Windows server that can be used for the media server purpose, any decent desktop can be used to run WME. One stream in, multiple streams inside. Problem solved.
Oh, that's right you can't use this, it involves Windows, and you won't admit that anything involving Windows can solve any problem. Sorry.
Just do the same thing the school did when they showed Bush's inauguration to all the students.
Oh...
. . . that creepy "Yes, we can" song, and will their parents stand along the walls trying to out-smug one another?
What you're saying is that you didn't vote for the candidate based on his qualifications or experience, but voted on him based on his skin color. That is racism, plain and simple, even if the result was a positive one in your eyes.
The truth is, Obama's experience growing up in America is affected by his skin color, is affected by the fact that he had parents very different in appearance (aside from the obvious male/female differences). You cannot judge his qualifications and experience without considering race.
The truth is, while we have come far as a society, we still have a ways to go. This is not an either/or proposition. It would not be fair to exclude race as a consideration in judging Obama as a presidential candidate, any more than it would be fair to judge him solely on race.
Because, it appears, that the problem is that they only have enough bandwidth two support one or two copies of the stream. If you have computers in 15 different classrooms, and the teachers load up hulu.com (or cnn.com, msnbc.com, cspan.org, whatever) and play the video, this will result in 15 different copies of the stream being separately downloaded.
What they need is some sort of multicast-like solution - something where the stream is being downloaded only once. Since the Internet hasn't really adopted multicast (which is really the 'solution' for these types of problems), the next best thing is, as some people have suggested, some sort of 'proxy server', which goes and loads the video, over the T1, then all the classrooms stream the video from that proxy server over the LAN.
I wonder if VLC could be used to do such proxying (probably depends on the stream format - if it's a 'standard' format without DRM, VLC might be able to handle this)?
I have used Adobe Flash Media Encoder for live streaming in large halls.
The setup I have used is something like this:
Stuff you need:
1. Get a decent camera with a firewire port.
2. Get a laptop with a firewire port. You can use a desktop too. Lets call this the "Encoder Laptop."
3. Load Adobe Flash Media Encoder on it. It is available free from Adobe.
4. Get an account with a Flash streaming service such as Serverroom.us (I have used their service and I recommend them).
5. Get a mixer for handling the audio.
6. Get a cable for connecting the audio from the mixer to the "Encoder laptop"
7. Get a firewire cable for connecting the camera to the "Encoder Laptop"
The process:
1. Connect the camera to the "Encoder Laptop" using a firewire cable.
2. Pass the audio from the mixer to the laptop's microphone / line input.
3. Start up Adobe Flash Media Encoder on this laptop.
4. Select the camera as the video source. Select the microphone / line in as the audio source.
5. Set up the address of the streaming server to point to your account with any streaming service (example Serverroom). You can also test this using justin.tv or ustream.tv.
The other option would be to run your own streaming server locally. You can download the Adobe Flash Media Server or the Wowza Media Server. Red 5 is yet another option but I am not sure how well it handles H.264 of VP6 streams.
All you need to display the stream would be to get yourself a computer with Flash plugin installed and then you can setup a player such as the JW Player (check on the web) to connect to the streaming server to play the stream.
This is based on the possibility , puzzling as it might seem that
1. Broadcast TV won't do it.
2. Everyone involved is rather lazy
3. There is at least one ethernet connected computer in each classroom or other viewing spot.
4. Direct Software cost (like buyng rec-coding stuff, ala adobe/real/microsoft) won't work.
5. Did I mention lazyness?
6. Zero to less network background,experience,etc
So, we have :
1. One computer that recieves the main stream, (cnn, c-span, etc).
2. It also runs a VNC server (tight, real, ultra,etc)
3. All viewing computers run a corresponding VNC client, preferably set to relative low,but tolerable quality mode. preferably connected in viewonly mode (so no 2nd graders pull pranks)
4. Central computer is in the principal's office and the audio is piped over the public annouce system (VNC not so good for audio)
Voila, all local area network computers can view (& hear) and only 1 incoming stream is needed.
Cost: 0 in software, 4-8 hour in client computer setup (teach email giving link to where to download VNC viewer).
No routing or multicast wizardly and everybody gets to watch and listen (over the PA system)
Alt solution:
Every class takes a field trip to the Mall (or wal-mart) electronics sections and watches it on broadcast television there.
Downside to alt fix, costs fuel.
Gee, I can't believe how nasty and sarcastic many of these replies have been. As an instructor at a state technical college, I can tell you that we do not have TVs in every building not to mention every classroom. Also, the administration has chosen not to set up a viewing in the auditorium because of politics (our governor is republican). I plan on streaming the event in my classroom, but the results will be less than optimal.