high quality video service

[Christopher Cope]

from the sync today, heres a detailed description of what ive learned re: 
high quality video a few months ago

this will probably turn out to be a long email, so if you want, just 
disregard this. :)
i sent ivan a big long email a couple months ago, but cant find a saved 
copy of it, so this is gonna be an attempt to say the same thing:

IMO, the only software out there that looks good for this is live.com. its 
a bunch of libraries for streaming/receiving multimedia on rtp multicast.
live.com is not a collection of applications, but rather libraries meant 
to be used to build applications. however the demo apps it comes with can 
easily be modified to do what you want. for video, theres a sample app 
that just streams a mpeg1/2 video file over mcast, but i just piped the 
output of an encoder into it. code was put into mplayer (mplayer.hq.hu) to 
allow it to use the live.com libraries to playback streams from rtp on 
mcast if given an sdp file.

so as of a couple months ago (the last time i played around with this 
stuff), you can stream mpeg1 and mpeg2 video from an encoder (i used 
mencoder i think to read from the v4l device) and stream it with live.com. 
then you can play it back with mplayer, if you first build it along with 
live.com. http://live.com/mplayer/

last time i checked, MPEG4 and MJPEG were not fully implemented under 
live.com. for each codec to work, you need a RTPSink library which takes a 
specific codec stream as an input, a Framer (to break it into frames), 
and an RTPSource library, which reads it over multicast and feeds it to 
your playback app. MPEG4 is missing a framer in live.com, and MJPEG is 
missing both an RTPSource and a Framer.

live.com has more info on this stuff.

but anyway, the point is that we can stream and recieve MPEG right now. 
the one piece its missing to be useful for AG, is that mplayer does not 
know what to do when it tries to read from a mcast channel with multiple 
video streams. bob mentioned being able to direct new instance of mplayer 
to each stream given the current AG video service structure.

hope this helps answer your questions since you all were asking about 
this. i have a more verbose writeup, though dont know why anyone but me 
would want to mess with this. just thought you wanted to know what 
possibilities are out there.

chris