Streaming the Inauguration In a School? 201
Anonymous Teacher writes "I work in a small school in Washington and we are trying to prepare a way to watch the inauguration in 20 classrooms over a 1.5 T1. As our bandwidth severely limits the ability to individually stream to these rooms, is there an alternative to presenting it to the students? Are there any sites that offer a downloadable copy of the video quickly after the event that can be hosted locally or is reconfiguring the computers to use a proxy server the best solution?"
Projector (Score:4, Insightful)
television (Score:5, Insightful)
TV (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this why... (Score:5, Insightful)
...we don't get much bang for our education dollars? Something that is going to be broadcast on 97 different networks for free, and you need to go through who knows what effort to stream it? Do you have math classes at that school? Get some parents to volunteer to bring in a TV. If you want the kids to see it later, you don't think YouYube will be inundated with copies of it?
Re:television (Score:5, Insightful)
CSPAN?
Re:television (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, in theory.
But in practice, your argument just doesn't stand up.
First: TV is best. It's a broadcast medium, made to transmit a single moving image to thousands (or, in this case, millions) of recipients. It does this job very well. If you want to avoid outlandish commentary and commercialization, obvious channel choices are either C-Span or PBS (in order of preference).
Second: There isn't enough bandwidth in a T1 to send 20 video streams of any rational (for 2008) quality. Multicast IP would solve this problem, of course, but the M-Bone is all but dead. (Wikipedia those terms yourself if you don't understand.)
Third: Why do you assume that the coverage on a television channel like C-Span is worse than the coverage which might be available online? No matter what the medium, someone has to produce the feed, and in doing so, they'll almost certainly be adding commentary of some sort.
Fourth: Internet video for the sake of internet video. Who gives a shit? I know it's 2009, and we're supposed to be in Teh Future and stuff, but for fuck's sake: If, in 2009, this were a solved problem, the question would never have been raised. Think about it.
Re:VLC? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm... TV...
Dag Nabbit Back in my day classrooms had TV that you can pick up via Radio waves. Near every classroom had a TV, a huge 20" TV. I remember watching the first shuttle launch after the challenger exploded. The results of the first O.J. Simpson trial. Also other big current events that has happened during school hours. For the classes that didn't have a TV we just merged 2 classes together. I can't believe that civilization has fallen so far that this simple concept is no longer possible. And you need to setup some odd Internet Hack to watch this.
No wonder schools are always running out of money, no one is smart enough to do it the easy way.
Re:television (Score:3, Insightful)
Radio was an improvement over not witnessing it at all.
Remember, kid: The United States hasn't always had a thorough network of interstate highways and a monsoon of motor vehicles with which to utilize them. If a Californian wanted to see an inauguration in the early 1800s, it'd have taken months, and few would have had the wherewithal to do so. Instead, they just read about it in the left-coast newspapers, once the news eventually showed up over there.
Radio is definitely a step forward, in comparison.
Re:Just do what you did... (Score:5, Insightful)
First Black President, that's why this is important. I plan to watch it. This is how far we as a nation have come in the 60 years since the civil rights movement and the Jim Crow laws that held black people down for so long. More than just another president being inaugurated this is a statement that anyone can achieve anything they push for. Yes, I'm a flag waving optimist about this but having grown up in an inner city and having seen the devastation of being poor in America, It makes me hopeful that things can change for the better.
This is the kind of thing that can give an inner city kid a shred of hope that he can get out of the slums and into something better.
I'm starting to get all preachy now, but that's why this is something kids should watch.
Re:There's this invention called television (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bunch of Crap (Score:3, Insightful)
Being black helped Obama during the election, period.
This is exactly why this is such a huge deal and worth celebrating. One of these days we'll get over skin colors entirely, but until then, I'm quite happy with the American consciousness having become explicitly in favor of electing a black person.
Re:Your racism is showing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hi, I'm a good ole boy from Alabama and I get called a racist--that is, racist against anyone who isn't white--all the time on the interwebs. So allow me to weigh in with my racist opinion. I am glad Obama got elected. Back in the 60s, or even the 80s, a black president was an impossible dream. Now today it is reality. This is certainly proof of how far we have come as a nation. This is a shining example for the world to see, at a time when America's image is somewhat tarnished. I'm happy that black folks, especially the old timers who saw real racism in past decades, now have something like this to stand up and be proud of. I'm glad that we had a record turnout this election and large numbers of people becoming interested in politics. It's good for the country. The story of a poor black kid growing up to be the president of the United States is very inspiring. It IS a big deal.
Chucking... (Score:5, Insightful)
This old fogy is getting a good laugh at the thread. Some (very few) have already touched on it, but what the hell is wrong with watching TV on a TV? Borrow someone's huge-ass plasma and set it up in a large classroom. You don't even need cable or satellite as the broadcast networks will be covering the inauguration stem-to-stern in beautiful 1080i HD.
But no, the parent is hellbound to do this via computer. (And most of the responses seem to be troubleshooting and spitballing the idea.) Why? Because it's "cool" or the latest thing? Because he has some anti-TV bias? Or because he's so caught up in that "it's newer, so it must be better" mentality and literally did not even think of good old broadcast TV?
Sometimes the best and most appropriate technology is the good ol' tried and true. There are many applications in life where previously existing and "old fashioned" solutions are good enough. (And much simpler.) Often it's also cheaper, and it's almost always a hell of a lot less convoluted and headache-inducing.
Alas, so many are caught up in this "newer must be better" mentality. And the companies who develop and more importantly sell the stuff feed the frenzy by insuring that there's always something new out there to shell out the big bucks for. Today's new, neat-o technological breakthrough will be "obsolete" next year (hell, maybe next month) and of course you are encouraged to upgrade or replace what you already have that still works perfectly well for the newest, biggest, fastest, sharpest, shiniest, coolest thing. Feel free. I sit here with my old computer, relatively tiny picture-tube TVs, $29 radio and CD player, books and printed newspapers, and enjoy the hell out of all of them with no diminishment of my quality of life because all of these things are "old-fashioned." And I laugh.
Now, turn down that music and get off my lawn, you whippersnappers...
Re:Is this why... (Score:3, Insightful)
Around 1992 when I was in school in Ohio, there was a big effort to put televisions in every classroom. Nothing terribly fancy; just wall-mounted 21" Zenith TVs with a factory modification so that they could be turned on centrally. Larger classrooms got more than one. There was a fairly elaborate head-end system with automated tape recorders which would record educational programs (apparently broadcast during middle-of-the-night off-peak hours for free). The regularly-scheduled use of this system was for a specially-produced program of current events and a bit of science, which the entire school would watch in unison. Regular cable TV was also available on the system (which the school would also get for free), but was normally turned off to prevent abuse.
Prior to that, there were big carts which lived in a few places on each floor of the school, each with a color TV and a VCR. They'd get wheeled around between classrooms as needed. But even then, we had cable. We watched the Challenger explode on the set in the school library (which was then quickly turned off, and we were ushered back to our classrooms in solid wonderment about what the silence was all about until we got home).
I'm also old enough to remember film projectors being used in school. There typically was a large projection screen which lived on the stage, which could be used for assemblies.
I can't imagine that schools these days can't come up with a bloody TV, or a projector and a blank wall, or something that allows large groups of kids to watch a broadcast. If they really, really can't, they're doing something very wrong.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bunch of Crap (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:television (Score:3, Insightful)
C-SPAN has feeds in Windows Media and Real. Dunno how this maps to anything or how you can suck down either feed and "rebroadcast it" over your network. My guess is both Microsoft and Real have some gadget that would support this
VLC will also live convert a stream and multi- , uni- or broadcast it. A T1 connection should be fine for one stream, assuming that you have the local bandwidth. I actually set this up at a previous job. We had some DirectTV feeds going into a computer with a couple of video capture cards, and then re-transmitted it over the company LAN.
Interestingly enough, I am also helping with getting a school set up to watch the inauguration. Our solution, have all the students go into the auditorium, and display the video from an ATSC tuner on two projectors.
Re:logic error (Score:3, Insightful)