[Live-devel] liveMedia appropriate?

[Ross Finlayson]

>I am now looking over the liveMedia test programs and deciding whether the
>live.com
>libraries are appropriate for my application and thought someone might
>have a
>quick pointer...
>
>Basically, I am adding a server to the voice chat used in games. Since the
>server will be remote, I am assuming that it is going to want to both send
>and receive unicast packets, not multicast.

What do your clients (i.e., the games) currently do?  Do they use TCP 
or UDP, and if they use UDP, do they use RTP-over-UDP?

Or have your clients (the games) not been designed/written yet?

>First, the server would have to collect a group of clients in a session,
>so that only members of that session hear the voice chat. Then, each
>client streams his voice packets to the server, who forwards them to each
>of the other clients.
>
>The first version of the server can punt on mixing,
>and just restrict talking to one client at a time. Later I would like to
>have multiple clients talking and the server sending the mixed stream
>down, but that has its own issues (you don't want to get your own voice
>back, so there would have to be some smart mixing and different streams
>happening).
>
>We want to be able to dynamically switch codecs also.
>
>Anyone have thoughts about the utility of RTP and the live.com libraries
>for this
>application?

Assuming that your clients are using RTP (see above), then the 
"LIVE.COM Streaming Media" code would seem to be a good match, 
although there would be quite a bit of programming that you would 
still need to do.  Note, in particular, that the LIVE.COM libraries 
don't include any codec (i.e., audio/video 
encoding/decoding/transcoding functionality), so that would need to be added.

>  If you think it is a good match, do you have some pointers on
>where to look for examples of how to do some of this?

The "testRelay" demo application (see 
<http://www.live.com/liveMedia/#testProgs>) is an example of a simple 
relaying application.


	Ross Finlayson
	LIVE.COM
	<http://www.live.com/>