[vorbis] [new?] Streaming technique

[Alex Iribarren]

"Aleksandar Dovnikovic" <aldov at EUnet.yu> wrote:
>
> There is no point in having two 64kbps streams, because using
> bitrate peeling you can quickly create one 64kbps from 128kbps.
>

There is a point. Right now, when someone wants to stream audio, they
usually have to encode it at differens qualities
and offer several broadcasts to suit all users (broadband, modem, etc.).
However, my thinking goes as follows.
What if you could produce several streams out of one, in such a way that
they all complemented each other? Say, for example that you could 
break up a
128kbps broadcast into 4 32kb streams. A user on the client side 
with a slow
connection could connect to 2 of the streams for the maximum audio 
quality
allowed by his connection, while some one with a DSL connection could 
use
all 4 streams and recieve the broadcast at 128kbps.

Furthermore, the process of conecting and disconecting from the 4 
streams
could be automated on the client side. Say I have a double channel ISDN
line, and I'm listening to an internet radio station that uses this 
system.
While surfing, the client (say, WinAmp, for example) could be connected 
to
all 4 streams, so I listen to the radio at 128kbps quality. However,
when I
start to download a file and my bandwith gets divided between surfing,
downloading and playing music, WinAmp could drop one of the streams to
reduce the bandwith usage, and therefore the quality, to 96kb. This 
compares
to the present buffered stream system in that the music would not 
skip, the
quality would simply be reduced. Personally, I hate it when my music 
skips
and to avoid it I am forced to listen to low-quality music even if 
the rest
of the bandwidth of my connection is being wasted.

Dado Colussi explained the other part of the idea very well:

>Assume you're streaming a 128kbps stream in two different
>streams suggested: one base 64kbps stream and the other
>64kbps add-on stream. Someone capable of receiving only
>64kbps would catch the base stream. Someone else capable
>of receiving all of it, would catch the add-on stream
>too, and decode them as one virtual 128kbps stream.

>I can see benefits of this kind of technique in
>multicasting: as a multicaster you would have to send
>only 128kbps *total*, instead of 128 + 64. You would
>still reach narrowband users and satisfy broadband
>users without sending "massively" redundant data.

--- >8 ----
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