>> Great idea! It seems daft though to have to first down load the
>> files before playing them. What we need is a smarter approach which
>> concurrently retreives the audio data and pipes it into the audio
>> player process.
> Or alternately we need to harness packet audio/video into the
> distributed hypermedia environment, so one can link to real-time
> multicast feeds that are possibly kicked off on the remote system on
> demand. ??
> Marc
That would be fun! I recently attended a TCP/IP course given by
Jon Crowcroft (J.Crowcroft@cs.ucl.ac.uk) who told me that University
College London have been doing just this kind of thing.
They did live multicast audio to Europe of Bill Clinton's speech at
Silicon Graphics during his recent well publicised visit there. Thats
how I found out about the need for a 5 second fifo to avoid breaks.
A lot of work is going on in on multicast and we should hear results
soon. In the meantime I think that there is plenty you can do with
good old tcp and WWW audio replay on demand. The japanese telecoms
giant NTT have even demonstrated sending video via tcp, although this
does require some impressive video compression/decompression hardware
that will be a while coming to most workstations.