A Video Studio Over Ethernet - Can it be done?

mikejz84 asks: "I am working on a design for a college campus TV station. Right now I am trying to find a way to do live events on campus. The link at most would be about a mile and a half. I was thinking microwave, but want something easier. Our campus has a gigabit ethernet backbone, I am wondering if there are any solutions for remote-to-studio links that would work over ethernet and still have very hight quality video? Idealy, I would like to have it where I can send straight DV across Ethernet Live."

Three words - Q, O and S

[jgaynor]

Whatever solution you choose, the ONLY thing that will ensure good quality if you do run video over an IP network is QoS. While average load won't squash a tv-quality signal, little spikes here and there will. Quality of service standards will 'reserve' a portion of that backbone for your video. Low Latency Queuing (LLQ) QoS is probably your best bet if the video is time sensitive. Keep in mind, however, that even though you may have a gigabit backbone, your network edge probably hums to the tune of only 100Meg, with gigabit aggregation. Your video will be limited by this more than the backbone.

On a seperate note, your school (most likely) has dark fiber. When an institution trenches MILES Of fiber, they don't just pull a single strand through and then call it a day. That would be like building a 4 car garage to house your bicycle. They pull multiple bundles, each bundle containing over a dozen pairs. SOME of these pairs HAD to be allocated for video usage - talk to your physical plant people and light up some of that unused fiber. Once you terminate an unused strand it can be used for any purpose later, so even if your project is only temporary the school does not 'lose' said strand. You get your studio, higher-ups get the satisfaction of a slightly higher return on investment and the school paper can write a cheesy story about it.

Re:VideoLAN

[sunya]

We have a setup working on VideoLan working with Kfir [linuxtv.org] hardware encoders and Aminet 103s [aminocom.com] from Amino Commnuications (STB's) working with 2 MBits!! Each costs about USD 200.