Seeing Ear Theatre
Frank Swarbrick
I was listening to episode 1 I would get about 30 seconds of audio for
every two minutes of "buffering"! I had to give up.
Frank Swarbrick
home: inf...@sprynet.com / work: frank.s...@efirstbank.com
"I'm very seldom naughty." --Willow Rosenberg "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
Jms at B5
>I was listening to episode 1 I would get about 30 seconds of audio for
>every two minutes of "buffering"! I had to give up.
>
What speed are you logging in on? In my case they always play straight
through. Once I had a brief buffering wait, but that was it. I'm in at 50 or
so.
jms
(jms...@aol.com)
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Pål Are Nordal
>
> Is there a way to download the episodes and then listen to them? When
> I was listening to episode 1 I would get about 30 seconds of audio for
> every two minutes of "buffering"! I had to give up.
You can tell RealPlayer to buffer more in View->Preferences->Connection.
Clicking on the "Auto Configure" button under the transport tab also
makes it choose the most efficient way to receive data from the server.
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J.D. Forinash
Jms at B5 <jms...@aol.com> wrote:
>What speed are you logging in on? In my case they always play straight
>through. Once I had a brief buffering wait, but that was it. I'm in at 50 or
>so.
I ran into this problem as well-- the first, oh, twenty or so minutes played
(I'm guessing it's about a 30 minute piece...) fine, then it started to
stutter. "Network Congestion", it claimed.
...and I'm on the other end of a cable modem. The problem is probably not
the dial-up connection, it's all the points in between.
What it really boils down to is that the 'net still is not quite ready for
this sort of thing. It's basically inherent in the design of a
packet-switching network that you can't guarantee that for thirty
minutes you'll get the bandwidth you need to stream, in this case, even
just stereo audio. The design of the 'net is such that you can _never_
get that guarantee, but you can get arbitrarily high chances of getting
what you need by throwing more hardware at the problem. Of course, the
'net is still in an expansion mode, so as people throw more hardware
at it, we'll saturate that, too (doing stuff like streaming video, better
quality video....), so it could be a while before we can _really_ say
"Yeah, streaming audio is a reasonable way for people to listen to stuff
on the 'net."
Especially when the solution could simply be "let the person download the
whole thing and play it locally." But then, they have a _copy_ of it. And
that's got licensing issues, and you have to expect them to play nice with
their copy of it and not, say, mirror it for the world, claim it's theirs,
etcetera.
I just hope it gets better before the artists who create these things
decide that they're sick of people not getting their works the way they
were intended.
-JDF
--
J.D. Forinash ,-.
Georgia Tech College of Computing CNS ( <
211 CCB; (404)-385-0391 `-'
The more you learn, the better your luck gets.
Lars Haugseth
* foxtrot...@cc.gatech.edu (J.D. Forinash) wrote:
[snip]
| Especially when the solution could simply be "let the person download the
| whole thing and play it locally." But then, they have a _copy_ of it. And
| that's got licensing issues, and you have to expect them to play nice with
| their copy of it and not, say, mirror it for the world, claim it's theirs,
| etcetera.
It's trivial to make a copy anyway, just connect the line out port of
your sound card to the line in port and start the recording software
that came with it.
Not to mention that the registered version of RealPlayer lets you
save the streams to a local file.
--
Lars Haugseth [Remove hyphen for personal email address]
Andrew Swallow
Forinash) writes:
[snip]>Of course, the
>'net is still in an expansion mode, so as people throw more hardware
>at it, we'll saturate that, too (doing stuff like streaming video, better
>quality video....), so it could be a while before we can _really_ say
>"Yeah, streaming audio is a reasonable way for people to listen to stuff
>on the 'net."
We also need to make the streaming modes multi-drop. If 10
people on the same server are listening, sending 10 copies to
the server is a big waste of bandwidth. Send one copy and
get the server to duplicate it. The server would not need to
remember more than 1 seconds worth at a time.
Andrew Swallow