Page 1 of 1

Unicasting to 400 clients

Posted: 31 Jan 2005 13:43
by Sound
I need to broadcast a live video stream to 400 clients connected to the Internet, and I can't do multicast.

What's the best solution?
- Should I do UDP unicast to every single location using duplicate{dst=standard{},dst=standard{},dst=standard{}...}? Will this support 400 destinations?
- Should I use HTTP streaming and let clients join the HTTP feed?

Thank you all,

Alessandro.

Posted: 08 Feb 2005 04:14
by safull
sorry this mess.

viewtopic.php?t=7241

Posted: 08 Feb 2005 10:33
by Sound
Are the 400 users at the same time?

If you use 400 UDP users, even if they don't want the stream they receive it. So you're downloading the banwith. But your bandwith is constant use.

If 400 HTTP joins, you don't download the bandwith of your clients id they don't want to see the stream. Your bandwith will also be variable in function of how many clients are getting the stream. I think also this will produce more CPU usage, than UDP option.

I'm not guru, just net knowledge. But i will use HTTP join.

By the way see if you could use Multicast in UDP. This will depend on the routers to your clients and yours.
Hi safull, the 400 users are at the same time, and I don't have the problem of avoiding users that don't want to see the stream: I need to do live broadcasts to 400 shops, so I always exactly know that they want to join the stream :-) So this is not for normal Internet users but for a restricted network.
I'm not sure we can afford a multicast WAN all over the country, so do you think that in this case unicast UDP is less CPU- and RAM-intensive than HTTP?

Thank you! Alessandro.

Posted: 08 Feb 2005 19:57
by markfm
Unicast UDP is probably a good bet.

Also, if you have more than one user at an end node (remote site), you can also go two-tiered, have a single VLC client at the end node rebroadcast as a local LAN multicast.

Posted: 08 Feb 2005 20:07
by Sound
Hmm yes, this could be easily done with some kind of Perl script that downloads up-to-date network topology from a website and then generates local VLC command line choosing to either play or to play and rebroadcast to its child nodes.

If we go on with this, I'll post updates :-)
Thank you markfm and safull.