Comments on: Southern California Strings Seminar

By: Identifying Dark Matter: Coming to a Toy Store Near You? | Cosmic Variance

Identifying Dark Matter: Coming to a Toy Store Near You? | Cosmic Variance — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 23:34:32 +0000

[…] Have a look at a semi-humourous slide from the Southern California Strings Seminar which I posted about here and here. UC Irvine’s Jonathan Feng was talking about the search for dark matter, and the related collaborative efforts between collider physics, astrophysics, cosmology, and other areas of physics. […]

By: Making Their Point | Cosmic Variance

Making Their Point | Cosmic Variance — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:24:33 +0000

[…] I realized that I forgot to tell you how things went with the Southern California Strings Seminar’s second meeting, hosted this time at UCLA by my colleagues Michael Gutperle and Per Kraus, which I’d posted about here. It happened on the 23rd and 24th September. They did a great job of getting everything to run smoothly, we had the great surroundings of their nice new physics building, and so it went very well indeed. We had six excellent talks. Really excellent. The speakers were all very cooperative with one of the main things we asked: They devoted significant amount of time to carefully explain and motivate what their talk was about before launching into great details and new results. These were some of the best combination overview/technical talks I’ve seen of these topics. The schedule had plenty of time for expaning on ideas, questions, and discussion. It was all clear, informative, inspiring and fun. […]

By: News From The Front, I | Cosmic Variance

News From The Front, I | Cosmic Variance — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 18:27:50 +0000

[…] A snapshot of a computation I was working on earlier this Summer is below. Will explain later. Spoke about it at the Southern California Strings Seminar. […]

By: Happenings | Cosmic Variance

Happenings | Cosmic Variance — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 06:03:46 +0000

[…] And that’s just the beginning of the week! I’ve got to stop and write my next lecture for class in the morning now… Don’t forget (if you’re a research physicist in the area) the Southern California Strings Seminar on Friday and Saturday… […]

By: Clifford

Clifford — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 02:50:52 +0000

Right… that’s the problem. I have to have it on the IT people’s server….. Grrrr

This is useful though. Thanks.

-cvj

By: Jacques Distler

Jacques Distler — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 02:39:26 +0000

I’m sorry. I can’t speak for your IT people.

All I’m saying is that QTSS is

a) free (unlike Real, which costs a small fortune)
b) can stream over Ports 554, 7070 or 80

I’m sure your IT people are not blocking Port 80, though you will need to run QTSS on a different machine than your webserver, if you want to stream over Port 80.

It’s easy to set up, works outrageously well (even on a relatively underpowered machine, like the previous incarnation of golem) and, frankly, offers much better CODECs than Real.

The only good thing about Real is that they offer a free Linux client. The only way to get a QuickTime client under Linux (as far as I know) is to use CrossOver (which costs $40) with the Windows QuickTime client.

By: Clifford

Clifford — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 01:41:20 +0000

Jacques, my IT people here say they’ll only handle Real streaming, not anything else. That’s the problem, and why I wanted to convert my existing stuff. Are you saying I can get around this with QTSS? I thought that for anything other than Real, I’d have to have ports open that they won’t open…. Please clarify.

Thanks,

-cvj

By: Jacques Distler

Jacques Distler — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 01:14:30 +0000

The Darwin Streaming Server is the open-source version of the QuickTime Streaming Server.

They have precompiled binaries for MacOSX, Linux and Winblows 2000. The source should compile on most Unix platforms.

I use it on Golem and am quite happy. Why not use QTSS?

By: Clifford

Clifford — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 23:40:14 +0000

Thanks, Quantoken, but actually it is possible, and quite commonly done in our field. The issue here is the efficient conversion from one format to another, not the data possibilities itself. See archived video of chalkboard talks at KITP, Perimeter, Duke, etc, to name a few. Also, I know I can do it in Quicktime. It is the conversion from imovie to Real that is the issue.

But thanks for the comment.

-cvj

By: Quantoken

Quantoken — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 22:58:06 +0000

Clifford said:

“I set the frame rate really low on everything since you only want to see the changes on the blackboard, while keeping the resolution high so that you can read the blackboard. But I could not find the right set of parameters in the plugin to get it to stop rebuffering so often when streaming.”

Clifford, that’s not your fault. The internet technology simply has not advanced to the point of providing general user the kind of bandwidth high enough to allow real time streaming of video that is of quality high enough to read the letters on the blackboard. The constant rebuffering simply tells you that the amount of data is more than can be streamed in real time, so it needs to pause and catch up once in a few seconds.

Most residential broadband ISP are either DSL or Cable Modem. Most DSL provides a download bandwidth of 256 kbits/second, which is roughly 25.6 kbytes/second. Assuming your frame rate is only 10/second, you have just 2.56Kbytes per video frame. You go find a high resolution jpeg image file that is just 2.56Kbyte and shows letters on a blackboard. You can’t. Smallest thumbnail images would be 50KB or more.

Quantoken