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Multicast


Can IP Multicast functionality be added to the JW FLV Player?

IP Multicast <http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6552/products_ios_technology_home.html> is a technology that has been around for a while, but not a lot of people use it, yet. It is an efficient way of sending high bit rate (bandwidth intensive) streams over IP networks.

Most streams today use unicast streams. Unicast streams use a lot of server and networking resources, because each time someone wants to view a stream, a dedicated stream from the server to the user must be created and maintained throughout the entire time the stream is being watched.

IP Multicast is a method of streaming high quality streams (today, I can watch an HD stream at my desk at Penn State 24/7 coming from the University of Washington) so that the source server only sends out 1 stream, no matter how many end users are watching. It also has the capability to trim down how many streams traverse the network all the way down to the specific LAN port (or residential connection) that a viewer is connected to.

Currently, IP Multicast is not enabled on most US residential Internet connections. However, many business networks and Internationally interconnected Research and Education Networks <http://international.internet2.edu/partners/> use multicast throughout their networks. There are countries, that are ahead of the US in broadband deployment that I would not be surprised if they already have IP Multicast enabled out to the residential customers. It looks like it is a technology that could be widely adopted in the future.

Many media streaming servers and streaming viewer apps have the capability of receiving multicast streams, including Windows Media Player, Apples Quicktime, open source VideoLAN Client (VLC), and others. But, Flash Server/Player does not offer multicast capabilities, yet.

If the JW FLV Player offered Multicast capability on both the server and client side in addition to the existing Unicast we could potentially see live HD video, or at least SD quality video (what you typically see on your CATV digital tv channels) with minimal bandwidth and server costs.

A lot of times the servers from the other vendors attempt to use Multicast first and if the client cannot receive the Multicast stream, they send it out via Unicast. This would be the ideal set-up.

Please let me know if incorporating Multicast functionality is something that could be added to the JW FLV Player. Thank you!

Cheers,
Tom

8 Community Answers

JeroenW

JW Player Support Agent  
2 rated :

It’s definetily something interesting, and something we’ll take a look at. I do think though that Adobe has to build such a functionality, both at the Flash Plugin level and at the Flas hMedia Server level. But perhaps it can be done with HTTP servers and just actionscripting…

JW Player

User  
0 rated :

I have a highschool where we multicast student anchors reading the news via VLC media player. Each classroom also uses LVC player to receive the stream (UDP) to a projector.

Now we picked up some awesome software, Adobe Visual Communicator. Great! No. Great software but only streams unicast in adobe format. DANG! I'm dying for some software that could listen to 1 FLV stream and then multicast we so can have the benefit of good studio software and the same UDP listeners around the school.

It's worth a pile of chocolate or some green motivation.

Greg
gjunell at missionprep dot org

JW Player

User  
0 rated :

Hi,

i'm trying to get back to the multicast topic.

For me, as not a Flash developer, Adobe has added confusion to this topic by using term "multicast" to call some application level logic in Flash.

I'm personally interested in video streaming/broadcasting using IP/UDP multicast and acordin to http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/p2p_rtmfp_groups_04.html, this is somehow possible in Flash.

Can someone clarify, if it is possible to use Flash for multicast video broadcasts?
And may be if JW Player is going to support it (with some server side software like FMS o WMS)?

JW Player

User  
0 rated :

Some details I've found about this in here also:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2009-develop/p2p-on-the-flash-platform-with-rtmfp
Video at 43:50

JW Player

User  
0 rated :

What about using the HTML5 player, would it be able to get a stream via multicast ?

Ethan Feldman

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

HTML5 does not support streaming like this by itself.

JW Player

User  
0 rated :

What about using p2p flash. Can i use multicast in FMSE4 with JW?

Pablo

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

@rentgen -

The JW Player doesn’t currently support FMS’s new p2p capabilities (RTMFP). We’ll be keeping an eye on this for future releases however.

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