IETFTV BOF Joel Jaeggli Internet-Draft University of Oregon Expires: July 30, 2005 January 26, 2005 Next Generation Effort for IETF Multicast/Unicast Delivery draft-jaeggli-ietftv-ng-00 IPR Statement "By submitting this Internet-Draft, I certify that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which I am aware have been disclosed, or will be disclosed, and any of which I become aware will be disclosed, in accordance with RFC 3668." (See RFC 3667 section 5.1.) NOTE: the words "or will be disclosed" are an addition to the RFC 3667 text, based on RFC 3667 section 5.1 being in conflict with RFC 3668 section 6.2.1. Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC 2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. This Internet-Draft will expire on July 30, 2005. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2005). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This memo describes one proposal for continuing and expanding the broadcast and recording effort while reducing the number of volunteers required and the expenses associated with providing the previous service Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 1] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Historical Efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.1 Equipment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2 Expenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.3 Shortcomings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3. New Effort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.1 Software Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.2 Hardware Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3.3 Server Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3.4 Meeting Room Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.5 Volunteer Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.6 Post Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3.7 Expenditures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 A. Appendix 1 - IETFTV BOF summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 B. Appendix 2 - Possible Hardware Configuration . . . . . . . . . 12 Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . 12 Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 2] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 1. Introduction With recent changes in the IETF and ways in which interested parties participate, there is a push to overhaul the mechanisms that are provided for remote participation and working group meeting archiving. For the past several years, two sessions have been multicast at two or more bit rates (low and high). These sessions have also been recorded and made available relatively soon after the meeting. More recently, experiments have been conducted in an attempt to add additional rooms with unicast support but only audio. At this point, the IETF is at a cross-roads. Because of perceived changes in remote participant needs and funding availability, the IETF needs to decide what is needed in terms of service to users. Furthermore, an analysis needs to be done on what this service will cost and whether there is budget to support it. This document proposes one possible approach, intended to expand meeting coverage while reducing the volunteers required to support this effort. Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 3] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 2. Historical Efforts Since IETF 49 the University of Oregon Videolab in collaboration with the University of California Santa Barba, various corporate partners the Secretariat and the IETF chair have scheduled and then multicast, the working groups that meet in 2 of the 6 to 8 parallel tracks scheduled every day while the IETF meets. 2.1 Equipment At present the resources required for each track recorded are as follows: o two cameras o a VGA scan converter o video source selector o audio distribution amplifier o 3 cable runs of approximately 15-20M o as many PCs to encode as source formats are required o an ethernet switch attached to a multicast capable network o a kvm switch, monitor keyboard and mouse o 1 Camera operator per track is required, in practice 2 to 3 volunteers per track spell each other over the course of the week o 1 person and an additional host computer are required to monitor the encoder hosts and output for both tracks 2.2 Expenses Typically the University of Oregon has provided 2 to 3 persons and shipped the bulk of the equipment (Cameras reside with the secretariat). Additional volunteers from UCSB and elsewhere have be funded through the IETF chair's ISOC funds or through the meeting local host, if provided by them. Domestically in the United States expenses run about $2000 per person for the duration of the meeting, internationally $3000 and up depending on the meeting location. Shipping equipment has cost anywhere from $5000 domestically to $10,000 internationally. 2.3 Shortcomings The current effort, despite all it successes has several obvious shortcomings: o Multicast deployment is required at end sites in order to receive multicast sources. While one of the University of Oregon's principle goals was and is multicast network deployment evangelism, many people who would like to receive the sources have little or no control over their network transport and are therefore unable to receive the sources. Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 4] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 o Poor scaling properties. While multicast delivery had decent scaling properties if audience size increases, covering one additional room under the current model requires a 50% increase in manpower and equipment. covering all 8 tracks would require on the order of a 4 fold increase in manpower and equipment o Equipment is expensive to ship and aging. The cameras (purchased by the IETF chair) are close to 6 years old. The kit of equipment provided by the University of Oregon is the third generation of equipment we have invested in, nevertheless large parts of it are approaching 3 years old. The kit is increasingly hard for The U of O to maintain. Shipping it, (2 large and 1 small flight cases, about 200KG) represents the largest single expense in supporting the IETF multicast o Poor clarity of mission. There are at least three major constituencies who are served by the multicast effort, none particularly well, remote participants and observers are placed at a disadvantage by the multicast requirements, the lack of complete meeting coverage and the subsequent gaps in the archive. IETF attendees have expressed a desire, to be able to monitor the activities of one working group while participating in another, and likewise are not well served by an incomplete record. Consumers of the record only, obviously have the same limitations due to coverageas the previous two groups Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 5] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 3. New Effort The new effort should meet three simple goals. It should be accessible to people with or without multicast connectivity, including availability on the wireless network for those attending the meeting, without adverse performance implications. It should be able to cover as many tracks as are scheduled in parallel. It should be sufficiently inexpensive that it can be funded as part of the ongoing operation of the IETF. The proposal Hinges on delivering a basic, audio-only unicast stream using a purpose-built but off-the-shelf hardware kit, and remote servers, leveraging the reduction in production resources (hardware, camera operators, management) to control costs while expanding to cover the whole IETF meeting schedule. 3.1 Software Platform For IETF 60 and 61 we experimented in a limited basis (4 rooms at 60, 2 rooms at 61) with an application, MUSE that provided a command line, curses, and X11 interface to stream via unicast http an mp3 or ogg audio stream through an Icecast 1 or 2 style server application or interoperable implementation such as Shoutcast or the Apple Darwin streaming server. Client support for this type of unicast delivery appears broad, with most platform's native media players (Quicktime, Real, Winamp, Mplayer, Windows Media Player, etc) being able to handle the stream, allowing us to leverage the current popularity of MP3 streaming used by internet-radio applications. Muse has several desirable properties: o It is open source, and is under active development. o As a command-line application it can be operated and monitored remotely relatively easily. o It is capable of simultaneously streaming and recording the mp3 audio stream. o It can embed a limited amount of meta-data in the recording and the stream about the program being received It is envisioned that a single operator can simultaneously monitor all eight of the streaming boxes from a central location, experience gained during ietf60 suggest that this is feasible. 3.2 Hardware Platform The hardware platform will consist of small headless (no keyboard or monitor) computers running Linux capable of being centrally managed. For audio-only streaming the principle requirements are a supported full-duplex sound chipset with microphone and line-level inputs, ethernet and a local drive for recording. Additionally form-factor Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 6] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 should dictate purchasing, it would be highly desirable if 8 of these units were sufficiently small the be packable as lugguage. One possible configuration might be built around mini-itx platform (17x17cm motherboard) would contain a 1ghz via c3 processor 256MB of ram a 40GB drive and be approximately 170x50x250mm and 2kg. Such units could be sourced for $500 or less each. While that is approximately the cost of an inexpensive laptop, mini-itx computers are about 1/2 the volume and weight of a laptop offering. A Dell Inspiron 1150 for example retails for $699 but is 45x329x275mm and about 3.5kg Miscellaneous additional hardware items needed to support recording are some kind of management workstation, (a laptop could be pressed into service there) cables to mate with the room mixer, various length ethernet jumpers and appropriate luggage for hardware to travel in. In total initial equipment outlay ought to cost less than $5000. Equipment that will have have to be purchased immediatly, to be owned by the IETF: o 8 audio streaming hosts at $500ea o Luggage style flight-case suitable to transport 8 hosts plus appropiate cable $500 o Misc cables to support various audio interconnects $200 Equipment that can provided through volunteer efforts (Joel Jaeggli): o Management workstation o Room Length Ethernet runs o Misc cables to support various audio interconnects 3.3 Server Resources Unlike the multicast services which requires no servers to deliver streams to clients, for the unicast streams sufficient server resources and transit bandwidth must be available to serve client demand. As delivered mp3 audio streams will vary between 32 and 64Kb/s multiplied by the number of clients joined. During the IETF 60 test, peak utilization of ~40 clients never exceeded 2.5Mb/s. While it is possible that servers could be located on the IETF conference network, doing so places an additional, possibly undesirable expectation on the host, According the University of Oregon and ISI's Postel center have offered to host servers. A server is a Linux or UNIX host running the Darwin Streaming Server or shoutcast 2 server, additional servers can be deployed when resources are insufficient on existing servers. At present, the University of Oregon has two such servers available. Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 7] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 3.4 Meeting Room Requirements In some key respects, delivering unicast audio will reduce requirements on the secretariat, hosting entity, working group chairs, participants and multicast volunteers, it adds some requirements as well. o Currently the secretariat schedules multicast rooms, this will no longer be required as all rooms will be covered. o Currently the hosting entity is responsible for providing an ethernet drop in each multicast room on a multicast enabled subnet, instead one drop per meeting room will be required, attached to either the terminal room or general conference network. Meeting room connectivity can leverage the network built to support the wireless in most cases. o A sound system will have to provided in all rooms where recording is desired, presently one is provided in most rooms. Costs of providing sound for additional rooms if necessary are best determined by the secretariat. o Working group chairs and participants will need to enforce microphone discipline, stating their name for the record and using the microphone for meeting participation. 3.5 Volunteer Requirements The volunteer requirements ought to be as low as two person outside of the additional requirements placed on the secretariat and the host. Two volunteers should all one person to monitor all 8 rooms and remote servers while the other is free for trouble-shooting and post production tasks. Additional host requirements (more network drops) ought to be offset by the reduced complexity of the network and the fact that it leverages network assets that have to be deployed anyway Costs associated with funding volunteers should be similar to current expenses. On a per-person basis, order of $2000 per meeting domestically in the United States (assuming volunteers originate from there). Reimbursable expenses will be submitted through the IETF chair. 3.6 Post Production Currently post production of video captured during the IETF is quite an involved process, and due to the size of the files created, and the overhead of delivering transcoded video for the archive can require several weeks of volunteer effort. The only post production the audio recording should require would be removal of any audio recorded prior to the commencement or after the completion of the meeting and the amending of timestamped filenames to a format that Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 8] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 allows the identification of each meeting. It is envisioned that principle post production tasks for audio can be performed during the course of an IETF meeting and the finished product should be available to observers and attendees before the minutes are published, much as the raw unedited video files are now. 3.7 Expenditures This proposal has about $5000 in immediate expenditures related to hardware purchases. Additionally, recurring costs to provide two volunteers to support the, effort are estimated at around $4000 per meeting. This proposal may place finacial expectations on the secretariat if sound systems have to be provided in additional rooms above and beyond what would otherwise be provisioned. Author's Address Joel Jaeggli University of Oregon 1212 University of Oregon Eugene, Oregon 97405 USA Phone: +1-541-346-1716 Fax: +1-5413464397 Email: joelja@uoregon.edu Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 9] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 Appendix A. Appendix 1 - IETFTV BOF summary From falk@isi.edu Tue Dec 7 13:45:26 2004 Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 13:44:53 -0800 From: Aaron Falk falk@isi.edu To: minutes@ietf.org Cc: ietfcast@lists.uoregon.edu Subject: ietfcast: ietf-tv summary for the IETF-61 proceedings Summary of the IETF-TV BoF BoF Chair: Ole Jacobsen Notes taken by: Aaron Falk The purpose of the IETF-TV BoF was to discuss in what way multimedia capture of IETF meetings would best serve the community. Multicast was used by volunteers to provide audio and digital whiteboard tools starting in 1992. Tools and encoding formats evolved over the years until the present day where two rooms at each IETF are covered using MPEG-1 video and H.261/PCM audio four additional rooms with MP3 audio only. The streams are made available using ASM and SSM multicast (some individuals provide unicast reflectors) and the files are post-processed and stored in an online repository for viewing after the meeting. At IETF-60, there were about 20 "viewers" per meeting (ed: IETF or wg meeting?) with a peak of about 70. Feedback from the audio-only sessions was that it was hard to follow the meeting without some visual feedback, preferably the ability to view the slides. There have been 100's to 1000's of downloads of online files. The staffing and travel and equipment expenses have been borne by University of Oregon (UofO) with some assistance from Cisco and the IETF Chair fund. Typical requirements are 6 weeks/year for preparation; staffing and post-processing, 4-6 people (historically students) to operate the equipment during the IETF meeting; $10k for shipping (ed: per meeting? per year?); bandwidth for streaming and download (broadband, real-time bandwidth and server requirements are non-trivial). However, most of the expense is associated with the video capture: camera operators (labor and travel) and specialized equipment are required. The UofO is unwilling to shoulder staffing, and has run out of Cisco-provided funding that allowed their staff to travel and ship their equipment. The UofO never provided any significant financial support outside of staff. Several questions therefore arise: What problem is being solved by this service? Remote participation? Broadcast to a remote (non-participatory) audience? Creating a public record? Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 10] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 It is estimated that a professional staff would cost about ~$50k/meeting (based on similar hotel events). Various strategies of cost recovery were discussed including increasing meeting fees (~$25), charging online viewers ($100), selling CDs (~$100ea) or finding sponsors (~$25k/yr). There was a general conclusion that some form of service is useful and of interest but there were no clear recommendations identifying a primary audience or of cost recovery. No working group will be created from this BoF. ietfcast resources:_________________________________________________ user interface: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~llynch/ietfcast.html web archive: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~llynch/ietfcast/index.html Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 11] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 Appendix B. Appendix 2 - Possible Hardware Configuration One of The lessons to be taken away from previous efforts is that shipping and maintenance of the equipment necessary to provide the former service was one of the most expensive and time-consuming parts of the effort. With that mind, and the goal of simplifying the equipement, a more compact, rugged, and inexpensive computer is needed. The actual cpu requirements for audio encoding are signficantly more lightweight than delivering mpeg-4 video, a great assistance in reducing the scale of the equipment necessary to support this effort. One possible configuration that would be appropriate for our application follows (all costs are approximate): o Casetronic c134 aluminum chassis (dimesions 177 x 50 x 254mm) 60w external powesupply $150 o Via epia m1000 mainboard integrated ethernet, sound, video, ieee1394, usb2 1ghz via c3 cpu $160 o 256MB unbuffered pc2100 ddr dimm memory module $50 o 40GB 2.5" laptop harddrive $80 o cable lock $20 o Total: $460 Jaeggli Expires July 30, 2005 [Page 12] Internet-Draft IETFTV-NG January 2005 Intellectual Property Statement The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; neither does it represent that it has made any effort to identify any such rights. Information on the IETF's procedures with respect to rights in standards-track and standards-related documentation can be found in BCP 11. Copies of claims of rights made available for publication and any assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of such proprietary rights by implementors or users of this specification can be obtained from the IETF Secretariat. The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary rights which may cover technology that may be required to practice this standard. Please address the information to the IETF Executive Director. Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2005). This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors retain all their rights." 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