Streaming using 3 Gateways?

[CoDeX2k]

Hello everbody,

I have 3 VDSL Gateways. Each has 1 MBit Upload Speed. 1 MBit is to slow for streaming DiVX without problems. Is there a way to use all 3 Gateways to stream the file?

Regards,
CoDeX2k

[olegkirillov]

Nope, your gateways all use the different local and global IP addresses and unless you use some sort of load balancing software you can't accomplish the task. Even with the load balancer your clients will be forced to try each of your gateways until they find the least loaded one.

[CoDeX2k]

We have a big company central site gateway from Cisco which does load balancing very well. But it does like if you do an HTTP download you get 20 MBits if you do a second at the same time you will get another 20 MBit but you can't get 40 MBit with just one normal HTTP Session. You need the download with Download Managers like FlashGet. So I was wondering if it's someway possible to do that with VLC using more than one datastream or sending on more than one data stream...

[olegkirillov]

You look from the perspective of internal user, receiving the stream from the single source (Cisco router) as it balances the load on its outside interfaces. Unfortunately when you send stream to the outside world you have three separate interfaces/IPs presented to the users and no load balancer for them.
Your option is to use P2P streaming software like SopCast with one server and two relay clients inside your network, but your users will have to install special software (i. e. SopCast Player).
The other option is to use external relay with lot of bandwidth. You'll send a single stream up to relay and it'll distribute the data across users. I'm using TVU (as it is free), but again it needs special client and has a lot of problems. Also it is optimised for 360-384kbps streams.

[CoDeX2k]

Okay, even if im in the same net trough a VPN session?

[olegkirillov]

I'm not sure what you mean.
VPN does not help either, it has nothing to do with load balancing.
Using NAT you can set up simple TCP load balancing, but you can't do this for the external users.

[CoDeX2k]

Yeah, I think you are right. Is there a possibility to use the 1MBit to stream? What are the optimal settings for a streaming with 1MBit?

I tried h264 with 600kb for video, mp3 with 64kb for audio, TTL I used 1 -> works quite good

But I have one problem. All 50 - 60 seconds the data transfer is colapsing for one or two seconds and transfers only 60 - 70 Kbyte/Sec instead of the 100 - 115 Kbyte/Sec. So I get ghostings and pixel failures.

Is there a possible to fix that? Caching? Or something like that?

Regards,
CoDeX2k

[olegkirillov]

First you have to be quite sure that your codec won't produce the stream of more than your channel's bandwidth. Check the settings and play the stream in another vlc to see the actual bandwidth (it'll be higher than codec's output because of the container and packetizing overhead. Lower the codec's bitrate, if necessary. Also look at the played output - the scenes may contain fast motion or entire scene panning that are the hardest cases for almost every codec. The H.264 is a complex codec and could eat your CPU out, this can be the cause of the troubles with the stream.
If you satisfied with the result, try to stream over your Inet connection. If you did everything right, there will be no problems. But do not forget the possible troubles from the oversubscribed provider's network.