On Sat, 07 Jun 2014 09:39:32 +0100, Jim Lesurf
wrote:

In article , Richard
Kimber
wrote:
On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 15:06:06 +0100, Jim Lesurf wrote:


On a completely different matter, I note that you put streamers in
quotes. I've always thought that using a dlna server was 'streaming'
and that doing anything else was 'playing'. Am I right that there's
been a takeover of the term 'streaming' by the wider community that
does not use dlna? IMHO Software players 'play'. But, then, nowadays,
nothing seems to matter :-)

I confess I've become quite confused by the ways people have started to use
the terms 'streamer' and 'streaming'. I have the feeling that hifi mags,
etc have started using the terms for more than one thing without making a
distinction.

I use the old fashioned approach that I have something like a set of wave
or flac files stored on a device, and then a program 'plays' a file. I
don't think of that as 'streaming' even if the data is being fetched from
one machine as a program on another is playing it. Or if it is being played
from a NAS.

I *suspect* the key distinction is that I'm using a computer to run a
program to play a file and then send the output to a DAC. Whereas
'streamer' may be a device that isn't a general purpose computer. But a
device that provides its own user interface, and reads files for itself,
playing them out via its own DAC.

For me the advantage of the 'run you chosen software on your chosen
computer' is flexibility. e,g, On the PandaBoard I'm writing this email
using, I wrote my own simple wave file player to play wave files out to a
USB DAC. Yesterday I was playing a wave file I have on a NAS that way,
using SunFish and NFS. Is this 'streaming'? At present I wouldn't say it
was. But I may be conditioned by the *nix 'everything is a file' mindset.
:-)

But I'd be interested to see what definitions/distinctions others give of
this. TBH I'm not even clear what the details of things like dlna *are*
except beyond assuming they require some standards so the device can find
and identify what it can play.

The above has files in mind. Whereas 'streaming' could be applied to
situations where the source is 'stream' in the sense that there is no
predefined 'file' of a set size, name, etc. But a sequence of data from a
chosen source address.

Comments?

A "Streaming server" is one that provides a download at a rate that
matches consumption for 'playback' purposes (with a modicum of
buffering to guard against congestion/contention induced 'dropouts').

At least, that's _my_ understanding of the distinction between
dowloading / torrenting a 1 hour movie in a matter of minutes and
watching the 'stream' direct. AFAICS, other than that distinction,
they're both downloading processes.

The big advantage of streaming a media file over downloading one for
later consumption is that you can terminate (or even pause) the stream
at will, saving bandwidth consumption.

If, for instance, it turned out that you got bored with the streamed
movie or realised it was one you'd already seen before after just a
few minutes of watching it, you could terminate the stream and save
the server and the network links the burden of sending the whole movie
file.

As an example of this difference, I aquired some 54 episodes of the
Goon Show several years ago by redirecting winamp's output to a large
wav file over a 24 hour period from an internet radio station. The
stream was 64Kbps mono mp3 and the wav file grew to in excess of 7GB
(16 bit 44.1Ksps stereo).

After splitting the file into 2 sub 4GB parts (CoolEdit Pro wouldn't
handle bigger files), I was able to slice and dice the giant wav files
into seperate episodes, discovering that the 24 hours had actually
been enough to capture the full 54 episodes being looped by the
internet radio station.

Once I had my episodes, I converted them back into 64Kbps mono mp3
files creating a collection that occupied some 662MB of disk space. At
that time, I had a 10Mbps cable downlink service from NTL/Telewest
which, in theory, would have allowed me to collect the whole lot in a
matter of 11 or so minutes downloading time[1] as opposed to the 1440
minutes or so streaming time it actually took.

What that meant was I consumed less than 1% of the bandwidth I had
available to listen to the 'stream' live versus using up a maximum of
10Mbps if I could have found a server obliging enough[2] to match my
D/L speed with the exact same content.

[1] I swiftly discovered, after upgrading from the 4Mbps service, how
few servers on the internet could match my D/L speed. It was very rare
indeed to achieve a CD's worth in less than 12 minutes. Only a couple
of notable exceptions stick in my mind, Microsoft and Nvidia's driver
downloads sites.

[2] As noted, a very rare event. However, with VM's never ending 'free
speed upgrades', it seems I'm still ahead of the curve in overall
speed of the internet in general despite being on the slowest offering
short of falling back to a 'retentions' service.

Back in the days of 150Kbps - 4Mbps, when I first tried P2P file
sharing networks (notably torrents), I wasn't too impressed with the
download speeds compared to a direct download from a decent server.

Perhaps it was the quality of the client software I was using
(probably compounded by my lack of experience in setting such software
up) but the situation is somewhat reversed today. A lot of my torrent
downloads will match my self imposed 2MB/s (that's ~20Mbps) limit,
often exceeding direct downloads by a considerable margin.

I only discovered "The Joys of Torrenting" after a few years break in
trying to use torrent clients on the desktop PC when I decided to make
use of the Transmission Client service on the FreeNAS/NAS4Free server
(a no-brainer place to run such software) two or three years ago.

I'm not one of those folk who keep the torrent client active
regardless of use so I usually have the service disabled most of the
time, only starting it up when I get a hankering to collect another
bunch of 'large files'. :-)
--
J B Good