[Fed-Talk] QTSS implementation at Carswell Field (ANG)
[Fed-Talk] QTSS implementation at Carswell Field (ANG)
- Subject: [Fed-Talk] QTSS implementation at Carswell Field (ANG)
- From: "Hubert, Keil, MAJ" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 09:15:32 -0500
- Importance: low
Howdy.
The short explnation: We just got done introducing QuickTime streaming media
on our LAN, and we couldn't have done it without the help of Apple's
boffins. If you're considering toying with streaming, talk to these guys
first -- save yourself the headaches that we experienced.
The rest of the story:
Back in the day, Carswell Field was lauded for having a state-of-the art
television delivery system. A complex system of cabling and special
(proprietary) equipment was purchased when the new buildings were stood up
in 1997-99 to allow every Windows NT desktop to be able to view the current
CCTV broadcasts in a window on the desktop. It worked great ... for about
two years. And that was several years ago.
Since then, our CCTV equipment has degraded. Laser splitters burned out,
cables broke, PC interface cards became obsolete, and there were no trained
support personnel to be had in the Guard for love or money. In FY03, we paid
a high end consultant $50,000 to fix the system. He took our money ... and
left the system far worse than he found it. Considering that his was the
company that installed it to begin with, this didn't bode well.
After that fiasco, we made the decision to walk away from 90% of the CCTV
system (the PC component) and shift to four channels of live streaming
instead.
The first obstacle we had to overcome was the lack of equipment. We bought a
refurbished XServe G4 from Small Dog Electronics and requested funds to buy
an encoder to prove the concept. This last summer, we discovered that
Hurlburt Field, FL was going to send all of their Power Macintosh G4s to
DRMO. We asked if they'd transfer them to us, instead. When they agreed, we
sent a driver and GOV to fetch them.
This last month, a series of CCTV system failures had angered our executive
caste the point that they demanded a fix before our September drill. We set
off to have one channel of MPEG4 streaming operational. We had four battered
(but rebuilt) G4/933 encoders, one XServe QTSS server and three weeks to
make everything work.
The next problem was to get the server running correctly on the network.
After extensive coordination with Bob Fimiani, Apple's Account Manager for
the Navy and Air Force, we were able to negotiate a one-day whirlwind
consulting engagement with West Decker, a brilliant engineer from Apple's
Austin compound.
Mr. Decker gave us ten hours of his time, and attacked our queue of problems
with enthusiasm. By the end of the day (a holiday for our unit, so we were
free to devote the entire day to Apple Engineering), we'd corrected the LUN
masking problem on our Brocade Silkworm 3800 fibre channel switch, we'd
ironed out the problems we'd had using our XServe RAID units with our HP
Proliants, we'd corrected our 10.3.5 Open Directory services, we'd fixed our
web hosting problems and were configured to begin QTSS streaming services.
Not bad for one day's effort.
We spent the next two weeks struggling with the commercial and open source
QTSS manuals. After two weeks of building and rebuilding, we were able to
get a unicast stream of the video signal from the encoder to the server, but
nothing thereafter.
We finally hit the last day before the deadline. In desperation, we called
Bob Fimiani. He got us hooked up with William Cerniuk, the engineering
boffin behind army.mil. This is a man who speaks fluent military in addition
to idiomatic streaming-speak. In the space of two hours, he'd guided us to
bring up a sucessful, 300 kbps, multicast into our production LAN.
The final obstacle was a vexing mystery: no matter what we did, we had no
audio signal to accompany out video stream. Mr. Cerniuk stayed on the line
with us until we isolated the problem down to a bug with the video
interpreter itself. The Canopus ADVC-100 that converted our RF signal to
IEEE 1394 didn't use drivers (just plug it in, and QT Broadcaster accepts
its signal immediately), and there exists a bug somewhere between the
Conopus hardware and QT Broadcaster. The problem was that it encoded audio
at one step below your selection: if you selected 44 KHz, it encoded at 22;
if you selected 22 KHz, it did encode ... at 0 kbps. Once that one setting
was changed, we were golden.
The next night, we brought the Wing's intranet home page up on the 25 foot
screen in the main conference center for the pre-drill staff meeting. One
click off of the main page brought up an embedded QT Player within our
intranet format. Ten seconds later, we had live CNN. The commanders were
happy.
The point to all this is that while you may be better staffed and equipped
that we are in the ANG, you may be hard pressed to introduce streaming
services -- or any OS X services -- on your network without some kind off
help from the Apple support team. We could not have accomplished this
eleventh-hour save without them. Thanks to all who participated.
Cheers, and good luck,
Maj H
Maj Keil Hubert | Commander | 136th Comm Flight | 817.852.3322
"Foreknowledge is no protection against disaster. Even real-time
intelligence is not enough. Only force counts ... the ability to
strike sure will remain the best protection against the cloud of
unknowing, prejudice and ignorance that threatens the laws of
enlightenment."
--John Keegan, Intelligence in War
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