Re: Re: Whole House Audio / Video....Am I asking the Earth! Please Read

["Andy Laurence" <andy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

darren_karp2001 wrote:
> What is VideoLan and Nebula software and what does multicast and
> unicast mean...sorry but I'm a newbie!

VideoLAN (http://www.videolan.org)
It's a cross-platform media player that can play anything you have the
codec
for, and also stream out files unicast or multicast.

Nebula (http://www.nebula-electronics.com)
Software for the Nebula Freeview card.  It can run in server, client, or
standalone modes.  It downloads an EPG from the 'net and records programs
according to this.  The programming isn't great, but the big plus point is
being able to unicast or multicast a channel or the entire multiplex (up to
8 channels IIRC) across the network.  It's also xAP enabled, so you can
control it over the network.

Unicast and multicast are both ways of streaming live or pre-recorded
audio/video.  With unicast, the client asks for the stream, and the stream
is sent directly to the client.  With multicast, the stream exists by
default, and is sent to every client on the network whether they want it or
not.  Multicast only uses as much bandwidth as one unicast stream, no
matter
how many people watch it.  Unicast uses that bandwidth for each client. 
So,
if you have a 4Mbps stream, and four people watching it, multicast would
use
4Mbps on your network, unicast would use 16Mbps.

HTH,
Andy
--
http://ha.andylaurence.co.uk
http://projects.andylaurence.co.uk