[Asterisk-Users] Astricon Podcasts?

[trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com]

On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 12:57 +0800, Dinesh Nair wrote:
> On 10/11/05 12:34 trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com said the following:
> > Adding the record functionality and muting participants would also mean
> > that the hub server would be able to make audio files available after
> 
> i'd think that muting would be a prerequisite, even if recording was not 
> done. it'd be audio bedlam otherwise, and the speakers would be drowned out.
> 
> > connected in such a distributed environment listening live.  Show the
> > power to skeptics.
> 
> we had such ideas to use asterisk to broadcast our recent HackInTheBox 
> Security Conference (conference.hackinthebox.org), but bandwidth prices at 
> the venue were too high to make this viable, given that it's not revenue 
> generating.
> 
"corporate sponsors" :P

Aside from that there are alternatives if you are just doing a one way
stream.  With the proper gear wifi can carry a signal a considerable
distance, providing you can get the elevation on one end or the other,
or both (easiest since total height is divided between the two sites).
Most venues dont like people rigging up a c band dish in the swimming
pool area though :P

Then feed that to some site that is more remote than the venue, perhaps
a home or office of a local person, who gets the feeds to a bigger
badder server.  If doing one way latency and all that isnt that big of
an issue and you dont need that much bandwidth.  

If you were to only shoutcast streams at telephone quality you could
easily do that over dialup.  There are $10/mo tollfree dialup providers
in the US that could be used.  1 stream which feeds a bigger server that
handles all the clients.  Or depending on need, one stream off dialup to
a server that feeds 5+ leaf nodes where the end users connect to.  If
doing it asterisk style you can use mp3player() within asterisk to
connect to the aggregator system (ie what dialup feeds) or even the
leafs if you are big enough, yes there will be some delay, but it would
still work, however complex this has gotten.

http://lbtech.com/dialup/  (I am not affiliated with them just know they
advertise what I claimed earlier).  
"Monthly cost - $9.95 (NO additional fees or taxes, no matter how much
you use the connection)"  All off a US tollfree.  Could work to get the
feeds out of the building to a server somewhere to distribute that as
needed in whatever formats are required.

And if its a lecture hall, a direct feed from the microphone into a
system that does the streaming, you only need mono and low quality
bitrate for it to be quite acceptable.  

In theory, you could do several lecture halls at the same time off one
system with one inet connection, sound gear would be the hardest thing
for a laptop.  Maybe usb/BT audio devices given limited port spaces on
laptops.  Maybe multiple laptops doing wifi or whatever to each other to
share that connection.  

Even if it costs a small setup fee to get the outside line from a
conference hall (they will normally charge at least per outbound call,
if not a fee to have a line activated in the hall itself) the total cost
should be well under $20 to provide this, plus whatever it takes to
distro the streams to individuals, and that could actually be lowered by
having individuals with spare bandwidth donate systems to act as leaf
nodes.

Just a thought for next time this becomes an issue :)  But to spread out
the asterisk boxes in theory you could support many hundreds if not
thousands of clients at the same time off what appears to be the same
feed.  Using something liek ser (www.iptel.org/ser) as a front end you
could provide a unified sip address to people and have ser do load
balancing to the actual asterisk boxes acting as an application server.


-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
UK +44 870 340 4605   Germany +49 801 777 555 3402
US +1 360 207 0479 or +1 516 687 5200
FreeWorldDialup: 635378
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