Streaming to specific clients

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Guest

Streaming to specific clients

Postby Guest » 29 Mar 2004 03:53

Well, locally verything works just brilliantly. However had no sucess of streaming anything through comcast cable access to specific clients. Wonder if anyone could give me a hint on how to figure out what the problem is. tried multicast or specific IPs. vlc seems to stream, but nothing gets through. MacOsX 3.3 vlc 0.7.1. Thanks

markfm
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Postby markfm » 29 Mar 2004 13:46

Make sure your firewall isn't configured to block UDP, and/or the UDP port that you're streaming on.

When pushing to your friend, if they are also using cable, you must make sure that you are pushing to the friend's ISP-assigned IP address, not to the internal (local LAN) client PC address.

On the client end, their system also has to be configured to allow it through. For instance, I use an SMC firewall/router on cable. In order to turn on a push mechanism (outside world able to initiate a connection to my PC), I have to turn on NAT (network address translation) for the ports I want connected to the client-end PC.

Specific example, config at your friend:
My local PC is IP 172.9.100.2
My cable router is IP 172.9.100.1
Connect to the router, turn NAT on, UDP, port 1234, connect to 172.9.100.1
Check what external IP has been assigned by the ISP to the router -- say, 64.5.6.98

At your server end:
Do a point-to-point streaming session, targetted to IP 64.5.6.98

The stream reaches the cable router, which now knows to push that incoming stream to 172.9.100.1

Friend should now be able to do a receive UDP session, it'll be getting pushed directly to his IP address (172.9.100.1)

Be careful when twiddling with your router/firewall settings, only turn on specific things that you really need/want, so people cannot take over your friend's PC.

Guest

Postby Guest » 03 Apr 2004 19:06

Thanks for the answer. Not clear on this (sorry for beeing slow) Shouldn't it say: His local PC is IP.... and His cable router is IP.....?

markfm
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Postby markfm » 03 Apr 2004 19:50

No problem.

Check your friend's router, find out what IP address it has on the side that's connected to the Internet. For example, if it's an Earthspring account, it might have a WAN (Wide Area Network) IP address of 65.110.x.x (65.110.149.60, for instance).

Many cable routers have built-in firewalls, Network Address Translation, and other capabilities. NAT is the capability that is used if you want to "push" video, from your server to your friend's PC.

There are two basic NAT things that I work with on my own router -- Address Mapping and Virtual Server. Address Mapping is where you tell the router "Map this external Wide-Area-Network IP address to this internal LAN-side IP address". Virtual Server is a more specific NAT -- it tells the router that if there is a specific incoming TCP/UDP connection, on a specific Port number, to map the connection to a specific internal LAN IP address, on a specific port number.

Virtual Server is the kind of NAT capability that I would use, if it's available.

For example, if your friend's actual PC has an IP address of 192.168.2.30 (the actual IP address of the card in his/her PC), you would look at the router for the area to configure NAT, and set up a virtual server NAT mapping:
connect incoming connections to port 1234 (the default VLC port) to internal LAN IP address 192.168.2.30 Port 1234.

Then, on your side, the actual VLC server, you would launch a VLC UDP streaming session to 65.110.149.60 The router, the thing with the actual 65.110.149.60 (whatever address the ISP has assigned to it) address, will automatically pass-through the incoming connection on port 1234 to your friend's PC.

At your friend's PC, they would launch VLC, select connect to network stream, check the first UDP box (the one with no room to type in an address), and click OK.

Guest

Postby Guest » 04 Apr 2004 07:16

Thank you for the most excellent and patient clarification. Highly appreciated


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