Video streaming jettisoned

The ‘home brew’ video streaming technology we have been testing has not been a huge success. We started trialling the broadcast capabilities of Jitter, which of course, didn’t work. The next set of experiments was with Quicktime Broadcaster and Darwin Streaming Server. Neither of these worked either. The reason is the complexity of the network we are behind. We are streaming from behind a wireless router, which it seems impossible to punch a hole in the firewall of. The academic network this router is attached to is specifically designed to stop people streaming stuff out, for reasons of copyright and so on.

After much wrangling and a huge amount of staring and worry, we discovered last night that even if streaming *was* possible, there is no guarantee that the stream will be successfully opened in Quicktime Player, as our first off-campus tests opened up in RealPlayer without us asking. Because time is a factor, we made the decision not to throw any more days at the problem, and to concentrate on the rest of the piece.