Video over IP - Design Issues
H.323 vs. RealVideo et. al.
- Commercial solutions exist for streaming video over IP networks, including:
- Progressive Networks' RealVideo
- Xing Technology's StreamWorks
- VDOnet's VDOLive
- Vosaic
- VXtreme
- Vivoactive
- Microsoft's NetShow
- H.323
- RealNetworks is pretty compelling
- Servers exist
- Supports ASF
- What is the real video quality on an un-loaded 10Mb/s network?
- Lots of software, but not targeted at VOD (what about billing, etc.)?
- H.323 provides great interoperability with IP telephony, videoconferencing
- Servers don't exist
- Hardware codecs with video I/O exist
- Most all components exist, but what amount of S/W needs to be written?
- Take the engineer's approach -- demo and compare video quality
- on an un-loaded 10Base-T network
- with multiple streams (up to 50% bandwidth utilization)
- which one is cheaper out-of-the-box?
- Evaluate
- Video quality (on a TV)
- degradation vs. bit rate
- degradation vs. bandwidth utilization
- Interoperability with H.323 telephony
- Ease of server implementation
- number of multiple streams
- multicast
- Ease of client implementation
- Ease of gateway (tracking/billing/PMS interface) implementation
- Ease of TV/display interface design/implementation
- Cost of H/W, S/W, everything else
- What software already exists?