Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> ____/ Mark Kent on Thursday 03 January 2008 07:59 : \____
>
>> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>> ____/ Mark Kent on Tuesday 01 January 2008 15:06 : \____
>>>
>>>> Buffering can't make up for a connection which is too slow, though - but
>>>> as you say, the flash video format works well under even heavy
>>>> congestion.
>>>
>>> You can watch it in lumps though (pause instead of jitter). You can't do
>>> that with a complete download.
>>>
>>
>> True, but with normal connectionless packet networks, you have no idea
>> how long the next "lump" will take to come down, so it's not a
>> particularly satisfactory way of doing things.
>>
>> You can see this behaviour quite often on eg., Youtube, when sometimes
>> videos will play fine, but at other times, they get choppy, and randomly
>> pause and resume. This is an inevitable consequence of connectionless
>> packet networks. It can be solved, of course, by setting up
>> connections, but so long as we have huge swathes of router manufacturers
>> with products to push, this issue is not going to be "accepted".
>
> I'm not sure how we got this far off topic, but it's worth emphasising here
> that streaming is in a sense a superset of a so-called 'download services'.
I was driving at a rather different point, which is that 3-mode
networking is essential in order to get the full bouquet of services
properly functional.
> There are even graphical UIs for tools that download videos from YouTube, so
> the BBC shouldn't have gone with its 'alternate' solution _in the first
> place_, It's more versatile and it's cross platform.
>
I agree completely, but I think that the BBC were conned into handing
licence-fee cash, some paid by people of very limited means, over to
Microsoft, one of the world's largest and richest companies, by the
hundreds of millions, in order to buy a skin for the Silverlight player.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
| My (new) blog: http://www.thereisnomagic.org |
|
|
