FYI... A recent article I wrote regarding my streaming adventures.
==================Hoov's Musings
==================volume 6, number 7
Source: http://www.acuitive.com/musings/
Live From Mongolia
Introduction from Mark Hoover
Acuitive people have all kinds of interesting hobbies, a few of which I can
actually talk about. In the case of Roy Harvey, his hobby is providing
live or re-transmitted broadcasts of the Dalai Lama to his students across
the world. When Roy told me that my first question was “who finances
that?” I figured the equipment costs and service costs would be
tremendous. But Roy convinced me that it was dirt cheap, resulting in a
culmination of the movement to commodity status of bandwidth, servers, and
enabling software. I was astounded, given that I know many IT Managers who
are not taking advantage of such services within their businesses due to
the perceived costs. Therefore in late June, I asked Roy to write the July
Musing on his experiences in this area, with special emphasis on the
economics. Then we got real busy. The Musing has been written. But it’s
September, going on October. Oh well. I guess that means I need to get
started on the August Musing.
Here’s Roy...
====
About three years ago, Mark Hoover established criteria for his retirement
based on the advancement of technology. As the guest “Muser” I thought I’d
give an update on just how much closer he’s moved to retirement in the last
three years.
In his August 2000 Musing, Mark figured if he could just listen to
Philadelphia Phillies baseball from an in-dash Internet Radio system in his
car, then the time had come for him pour his energies into the next great
adventure perhaps helping the Phillies out with more than just bedtime
prayers.
Like Mark, I too spent my early years listening to AM radio. While I was
too far from Philadelphia to get a decent signal, the New York stations
came in clear as a bell from my room in Northern New Jersey. From the
nightly ramblings of WOR’s Jean Shepherd, I moved on to Ham Radio and as
many DXers (long-distance shortwave operators) have found over the last few
years, the Internet is a wonderful landscape for pushing the same
communications envelope.
Some guys are into cars, others are into golf or fishing, still others like
to spend their free time building high-powered trebuchets to see just how
far they can toss a pumpkin.[1] Outside of waterslide parks and camping
with the family, I like to see how far and wide I can stream packets to
listeners throughout the world for little or no money down. In a small
corner of my basement lives the network operations center for the
Internet’s first and currently largest “Tibetan Buddhist” Internet radio
station. The lectures are usually on various philosophical topics and
typically run 1 to 2 hours in length. When I'm not providing a live
broadcast, "The Station" server streams various MP3 files from its
local
hard disk. I started doing this casually back in late 1999, but things got
serious a short time later when I provided audio streaming services for the
14th Dalai Lama’s lectures at Shoreline Amphitheater here in Silicon Valley.
From a networking perspective, my connectivity consists of a megabit SDSL
(1.1Mbps up / 1.1Mbps down) from Speakeasy a very progressive and scrappy
ISP that’s deservedly become the nation’s largest independent broadband
provider. I pay a couple hundred dollars a month for unlimited
bi-directional transfers and half a dozen static IP addresses. Should I
need a little more bandwidth for a special event, a simple phone call and
their provisioning system makes it happen almost at once. Overall network
stability, availability, and throughput has been rock-solid. Speakeasy
also includes unlimited nationwide dial-up service; you'll see later why
this is important.
My servers are all Intel-based, either donated or so low cost as to be
free. For instance, last year I bought 3 1-rack unit 750Mhz servers from a
failed dot.com liquidation for $125 each. Sold one online for $500, thus
paying for the other two plus profit. My primary webcasting box is a dual
500Mhz 3U that a listener gave to me. It was sold originally by Entera, a
caching company that packaged it as a $10,000 appliance before getting
acquired by CacheFlow. This box can be thought of as "The Radio
Station"
and as far as MIPs are concerned, it's not breaking a sweat. Before this,
a lowly decommissioned 586 desktop handled the task with little or no trouble.
For broadcasting live events, I use my 3 year old, day-to-day workhorse
laptop (Dell 500Mhz Inspiron 4000) for the onsite encoding and transmission
of the webcast "signal" to the broadcast server. The only hardware
required for a “broadcast quality laptop” are a microphone input jack and a
56kbps modem, both of which come standard on most laptops shipped since
about 1998. The software to drive the server side is Linux running Icecast
and Apache all free, open source projects. The laptop itself runs
Windows 2000 (not free), Nullsoft’s WinAmp (free), the OddCast plug-in for
WinAmp (free), and an MP3 encoder unfittingly called “Lame” (also free).
In a nutshell, here’s how the system works… Using a simple lavaliere
microphone or a bunch of them feeding a cheap Radio Shack mixer, I bring
the signal directly into my laptop via the microphone jack. Using WinAmp
and the Oddcast plug-in, I encode the audio into the MP3 format and stream
it out the modem port over the Internet via a dial up to connect to the
server at my house. The MP3 stream arrives in my basement as a 60 second
buffered stream (which provides plenty of fault tolerance) where listeners
connect using Real Audio, Apple’s iTunes, Windows Media Player, or WinAmp
connecting into port 8000.
Given that I'm primarily delivering “spoken word” webcasts, I can encode
the signal at a 16kbps rate and still provide a reasonably high quality
listening experience similar to good AM radio. This has three benefits,
(a) the MP3 stream is fairly stable under even the most horrid dialup
connections, (b) I'm able to support more than 60 active listeners on my
broadcast server using my 1.1Mpbs SDSL line, and (c) it provides lowest
common denominator support for reaching the farthest flung Internet
connections on the planet. Watching my DNS logs as well as listener “fan
mail”, I’ve had people tuned in from all corners of the globe, including
such exotic locations as the Christmas Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Nepal,
Slovakia, and even Iraq.
There are three types of live broadcast configurations that I've
successfully conducted since I started doing live broadcasts:
Live Remote - this is where I stay home and someone else operates the
encoded-upstream MP3 feed to the server (aka “the laptop”). This was the
first configuration I used as I thought it might be important to be
physically near the servers in case something didn't work. After a couple
of successful live events, this turned out to not be an issue. The only
problem to date has been the fact that our circa 1950s home electrical
system only sports a 30 amp main fuse which means turning on the washer,
dryer, and dishwasher at the same time causes us to lose power (and thus
the whole network of servers, networking gear, and connected
listeners). This generally isn't an issue and besides, I'm too cheap to
install UPS equipment. But this all came to a head last winter when during
one live broadcast my wife was using a hair dryer which, in addition to a
few thousand Xmas lights, caused us to blow the main, thus dumping all
connections, etc... I called her on my cell phone to find her in tears
over the whole thing "I was just drying the kids hair for their school
picture tomorrow…" We have a good laugh about it now. ;-)
Live Onsite Hey, everything on the server is Linux right? Which means
over a modem, I can not only pump the MP3 stream, but I can also have half
a dozen remote admin windows open via SSH and control and monitor the
network, servers, and everything while sitting at the event. As with the
Live Remote configuration, all that's needed is my laptop and a phone
line. Power is good to have as well, though everything works just fine on
batteries. With satellite-based IP available in North America, no more
need for even a POTS line more on this, and Mark’s impending retirement,
in a moment…
Live Exotic In June I tried something a bit different; an historic first
in my mind. What made this different was the fact that the speaker being
broadcast was located in Ulaanbaatar, capital city of Mongolia. This is
about 10,000 miles or so and many time zones from my “station” in
California. And just to up the ante, we did the broadcast by having the
speaker use a cellular phone for an hour-long live event. The call
terminated at my house and using a simple Radio Shack phone-patch, I drove
the audio into the laptop on my desk and then via my server to a worldwide
Internet-connected audience. The signal never once dropped out or faded
during the entire hour, and the audio quality was very passable. Mongolia,
while being a very poor country, has an amazingly reliable and burgeoning
cellular industry utilizing GSM.
Note to self while long distance communication fees are accelerating
asymptotically towards zero, they aren’t free yet. Make sure you
double-check your international calling plan rates before attempting such a
stunt at home. It turns out that the price of phone calls to Mongolia
rival even those wacky “phone-like” devices buried into the headrests of
most airline seats. Even so, to my mind, my entire broadcast operation is
damn cheap and near-free given its ability to reach most of the known
“Internet world” at pennies per serving. [Question for our telecom
industry readers anyone know what a worldwide live audio broadcast like
this would have cost 20, 10 or even 5 years ago to pull off?]
So what about mobility? I started researching this in earnest during the
Iraq war when we all got to witness one view of the war from
satellite-based video transmitters. Following the evolution of most
communications technology, it turns out that the prices are starting to
fall while product quality, features, and reliability simultaneously
improves. Mark was thinking live Phillies baseball in 2005 or 2006. Well,
turns out not only can he get live Internet audio today, but if he’s
willing to let his wife Jill drive (at least during the Wild Card race), he
can get a full DirecTV feed with 300 channels while also checking his
email, updating the Acuitive website, or publishing his latest Musing. For
more information, take a look at TracVision and TracNet from KVH industries
(http://www.kvh.com/) -- these guys historically built satellite-based IP
systems for military and nautical use, but have since expanded their
products to include automotive applications. John Madden has just such a
system installed in the “Madden Cruiser” to stay connected as he motors en
route to each Monday Night Football broadcast.
Hmmmm... Hey Mark! Ever considered professional broadcasting?
Back to Mark...
===
Thanks Roy. A broadcasting career is probably not in the cards for
me. Certainly not TV. And probably not radio unless they’ve perfected the
7-second delay.
I’ll have to look into the services you mentioned. If this Musing had been
written a few weeks earlier, with the Phillies still in the pennant race, I
probably would have gone for it. Now, I need a winter to forget and get
re-enthused.
Ironically, after Roy wrote this Musing he got a job offer from Electronic
Arts to help drive their online gaming strategy for products like Madden
Football. This is right up Roy’s alley and presents an opportunity to
swelter in Orlando, FL in the summer. So, Acuitive’s loss will be the
Internet gaming world’s gain. So long to you Roy and much luck. We’ll
miss you.
[1] http://www.worldchampionshippunkinchunkin.com/
(volume 6, number 7)
====Roy
Lam Rim Radio
Tibetan Buddhist Internet Radio
Over 500,000 hours served since 1999
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