[AG-TECH] AG on wireless

[Tony Rimovsky]

Ok.  Thanks for the explination.  From what I saw of the demo in San
Diego, the one box windows platform AG device looks very good.  


On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 12:12:27PM -0800, Jay Beavers wrote:
> Actually, running at these bitrates is not something limited to Windows
> Media compression.  H.261 can run these bitrates too, but with the
> quality hit.
> 
> We're in limited private distribution of our binaries today and have
> been running tests with the software between our lab and some
> universities for some time, as lab only testing is pretty worthless for
> these types of applications ;-)  We presented the first results of our
> 'over the Internet2' testing at the 2001 AG Retreat, so we've been out
> there for a while now ;-)  We're waiting until we're comfortable with
> the code quality and interoperable with lots of video equipment (such as
> the Hauppauge) before we go to an open release.
> 
> It's definitely true that the work done in WMVideo and WMAudio
> compression will not be cross platform.  There are limited ports to
> Windows CE and Macintosh, but the licensing / IP of these codecs are
> pretty tightly held and considered to be a key Windows differentiator.
> This is why we in MS Research are funding work on transcoding solutions
> to h.261, because we don't want to imply we're looking at a port of
> Windows Media to a cross platform codebase nor any form of open source
> release of the algorithms but we want to be interoperable with our AG
> work.
> 
>  - jcb
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tony Rimovsky [mailto:tony at ncsa.uiuc.edu] 
> Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 10:49 AM
> To: Jay Beavers
> Cc: Allison Clark; ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov
> Subject: Re: [AG-TECH] AG on wireless
> 
> But in practical application *today* on the AG, windows media
> compression is not in use outside of your lab, correct?  Will there be
> a way to use this compression from a linux based video or audio
> source?  I'm not trying to stoke OS flames here, just curious.  I
> haven't looked into licensing/source/etc for this at all.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 09:57:16AM -0800, Jay Beavers wrote:
> > I would disagree with the assessment that AG scenarios are too heavy
> for
> > wireless networks.
> > 
> > We comfortably fit four way conferencing, with one of the four streams
> > being 640x480, in 3 Mb/s today using Windows Media compression.
> > Assuming we limited ourselves to 6 Mb/s of bandwidth, we could add
> > another 7 320x240 streams at ~400 kb/s for audio, video, and data
> > bringing us up to 11-way conferencing.
> > 
> > Certainly, using more bandwidth per stream (such as MJPEG compression)
> > or trying to do 20-30 streams isn't feasible over 802.11b, but for the
> > sweet spot of 4-7 room conferencing, wireless is completely feasible.
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Allison Clark [mailto:aclark at ncsa.uiuc.edu] 
> > Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 8:47 AM
> > To: ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov
> > Subject: Re: [AG-TECH] AG on wireless
> > 
> > Ag-tech always has such lively discussions. My question stemmed from
> the
> > 
> > Advanced Networking with Minority Serving Institutions (AN MSI)
> program 
> > that has a little money to fund some ag node testbeds at MSIs. The
> > question 
> > of wireless came up for one of the schools. I wanted to check with the
> 
> > experts as I don't want the testbed to be too far out there - it
> > actually 
> > needs to work. Bottom line -sounds like it will suck up too much
> > bandwidth. 
> > Once again thanks to everyone.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Allison Clark, Ph.D.
> > Assistant Director, Digital Equity Initiatives
> > NCSA/The Alliance
> > 152 CAB
> > 605 E. Springfield Ave.
> > Champaign IL 61820
> > Phone: 217-244-0768
> > Cell:   217-493-8935