[WEB4LIB] streaming audio/video?

[Edward Wigg]

At 08:05 AM 12/8/2000 -0800, Deborah Lammers <dlammers at pamunkeylibrary.org>
wrote:
>....It is my understanding that streaming uses a
>lot of bandwidth.  I am thinking of restricting staff use, at least.  Am I
>being overly cautious?

Yes, no, and maybe. 

All streams are not created equal, and you give no indication of how much
potential bandwidth you have and how near peak utilization you already are.
RealAudio streams are often fairly low bandwidth, especially the news
oriented ones (often encoded at 8.5 or 16 Kbps, either of which are easily
useable on a 28.8K modem, even with other light Web browsing going on).
Depending on how saturated your current link is and how many people do it,
you might well never notice the additional load for such streams. Higher
quality audio obviously uses more bandwidth, and video even more than that,
though the lower-end encoding of each is remarkably stingy of bits when you
consider what is going on, and many sites have their streams encoded at
various levels to suit different bandwidth. I seem to remember that CSPAN
has a video stream encoded at around 100Kbps  -- obviously several people
using that at once will suck up quite a bit of a T1.

By setting preferences you maybe able to get some control over which stream
is used; for example RealAudio has a maximum bandwidth setting for
connection from 14.4Kbps all the way up to 10Mbps. If you can use this to
limit users to the lower bandwidth streams you are probably OK -- if you
have a lot of music freaks who want the highest possible quality, and who
change the preferences accordingly, your fears about bandwidth are
justified. It sort of depends on whether you can trust your users to be
responsible :-)

Edward