Notecomments re approval by IETF -- Anyway it is a very good film

[Dave Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

The feature-length film
 
"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" (85:00)
 
will be "broadcast" across the Internet on Saturday, May 22nd
at 8:30 PM EDT
 
To the best of my understanding
(no flames, please... I'm a videomaker):
 
This is a multicast of the video/audio across the mbone
(multimedia backbone)... The mbone consisting (I think) of
specialized routers (dedicated workstations) that are able to
pass on the multicast data packet, which is a subset of the
IP standard packet. There's an mbone.faq out there... I found
it through Veronica, the Gopher searcher.
 
Because of the standards difference, the multicast will only
be receivable at about 400 sites world wide. Video will be
somewhere in the 350 x 200 range, at about 3-5 frames per
second, black and white. Well, it's the thought that counts;
and the audio should be fair enough. If you really want to
see the movie, you will still have to go to a movie theatre,
or get ahold of a cassette.
 
Essentially, as I understand it, multicasting is at the
moment a Net videoconferencing standard, with PD broadcast
and receiving software available from a French research group
called (?) Indria. However, to avoid net clutter, broadcasts
have to approved by the IETF (?)... this WAX broadcast has
been approved. I saw a presentation at 3CyberConf last
weekend by a fellow named Pavel Curtis from Xerox Parc, who
spoke on how this is a very workable extension to MUD's, once
the bandwidth becomes available.
 
Tech details:
Multicast of Wax Saturday May 22nd at 8:30 EDT
The session will be set up with SD version 1.14
TTL 127
audio port 63440 ID 20968
video port 38877 ID 30041
 
If you want to know more about the film (I'm the maker), I've
got a pretty fat text file (80k) on hand I can email you....
but I cannot answer any tech questions about this broadcast!

artist1@rdrc.rpi.edu (Artist # 1)