Relevant Protocols for Media Fragments

Dear All,

Following a previous message from Silvia [1], I'm re-opening this 
discussion, see also a new wiki page [2]:

> I have just edited the section
> http://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Fragments/wiki/Use_Cases_%26_Requirements_Draft#Relevant_Protocols
> on protocols in the use cases and requirements document and removed
> some discussion around which protocols we are covering and moved it
> into the original use cases and requirements document at
> http://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Fragments/wiki/Use_Cases_Discussion#Media_Delivery_UC.

Basically, we agreed to consider mainly HTTP and RTSP, and Silvia added:

> I did indeed research the protocol case and found that almost all p2p
> protocols are proprietary, and that bittorent in particular already
> has an internal mechanism for receiving fragments of media files
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocol%29). p2p
> protocols are mostly about receiving long files and playing them back
> at a later time - so the need for addressing fragments doesn't seem to
> be there.
> 
> As  for mms: it was deprecated by Microsoft in 2003 and is not even
> supported in their latest software any longer.
> 
> These were the reasons that I thought neither mms nor the p2p
> protocols were relevant to our work. However, feel free to disagree.
> :)

I would love to agree, but my recent experience told me I should not :-)

Concretely, I went to my favorite portal to watch scientific talks,
namely http://www.videolectures.net, a very large portal that contains
videos synchronized with slides of all sort of scientific talks from
conferences and lectures from all other the world in various
disciplines, and it is growing very very fast! Among others, I could
watch some of the talk I did, for example:
http://videolectures.net/iswc08_troncy_biptc/

Now, looking at the source of this page, I can get two streamable
version of my talk:
   - wmf format available through the mms protocol:
mms://oxy.ijs.si:8080/2008/active/iswc08_karlsruhe/troncy_biptc/iswc08_troncy_biptc_01.wmv
   - flv format available through the rtmp protocol:
rtmp://velblod.videolectures.net/video/2008/active/iswc08_karlsruhe/troncy_biptc/iswc08_troncy_biptc_01.flv

RTMP, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Messaging_Protocol, is a
proprietary protocol developed by Adobe for streaming flash, that works
overt HTTP(S).

Conclusion: large video portal, widely used by the scientific community
... but no HTTP or RTSP protocols involved for streaming the bits! They
choose to go for proprietary protocols (Adobe, Microsoft), right, ...
but should we put them out of the future rec?

Best regards.

   Raphaël

[1]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-media-fragment/2008Nov/0046.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Fragments/wiki/Protocols

-- 
Raphaël Troncy
CWI (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science),
Science Park 123, 1098 XG Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: raphael.troncy@cwi.nl & raphael.troncy@gmail.com
Tel: +31 (0)20 - 592 4093
Fax: +31 (0)20 - 592 4312
Web: http://www.cwi.nl/~troncy/

Received on Wednesday, 14 January 2009 11:39:21 UTC