IP Multicast

Through IP Multicast, identical data can be transmitted to many users through a special Internet Protocol multicasting feature. This technology avoids clogging data networks and servers. Through IP Multicast, instead of a single server communicating with many individual computers, it sends content to many distributed routers that in turn distribute to many other routers and finally to many individual users.

How to get the client applications

IPTV Viewer

IPTV is a Cisco product and is a complete utility, meaning that it comes with a Program Guide and the tools to receive audio and video. IPTV supports many different types of video streams. Through our affiliation with Abilene, campus affiliates have access to IPTV client at no charge. It can be downloaded from the University of Oregon. Note that it currently works under Windows only.

MacTV

MacTV works well right out of the box, but only on the Mac.

"Standard" Utilities

There are utilities that predate the Web. These tools were initially developed for UNIX operating systems. They are currently being developed and supported by the UCL Networked Multimedia Research Group at University College London. Minimally, you need the session directory, and audio tool, and a video tool. Our recommendations are sdr, rat and vic. To determine if your platform is supported, refer to their grid. vic does not support all video streams, although there is other available software that does. There are no versions currently available for the Mac, but source code is available.

Be sure to install all the utilities in the same directory on your machine. Once installed, start up sdr. It will begin populating with sessions: If you right-click on a session listing, you can view information about the session. If you left click, vic and rat should start up (assuming all is installed correctly). If there are problems with the installation, please refer to the installation instructions supplied with the software.

What do I do if I don't see any sessions?

If your session directory tool doesn't populate with active sessions, multicast may not be enabled, or your host may be having problems. It sometimes takes up to 15 minutes to populate the session directory with all of the session announcements.