[streaming] Re: Listing Multicast clients !

[Marshall Eubanks]

On Dec 18, 2005, at 6:09 PM, Matthew Geier wrote:

> Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
>> Le Jeudi 15 Décembre 2005 19:03, Romuald CARI a écrit :
>>> I'm currently trying to do some statistics about the
>>> streams that my server multicasts over my network.
>>> The most important thing for me is to count how many people are in a
>>> precise multicast group, watching the video stream that is sent to
>>> them.
>> That doesn't work for Windows computers at least - they don't  
>> reply to multicast echo requests.
>
>
>  They used to. But all it proved was that they had a multicast IP  
> stack.
>
>  Now that Windows Firewall defaults to 'on' they probably no longer  
> respond to anything.
>
>
>>> If this does not exist, is VLC able to answer to some special
>>> datagrams sent in the multicast group that it is currently listening
>>> to ?
>
>  Cisco implement some sort of multicast feedback channel on their  
> IP/TV system so the IP/TV server has some idea of how many clients  
> are listening - or at least how many Cisco IP/TV clients are  
> listening, it's not going to know about those MacTV and VLC  
> clients....
>

IPTV and MacTV both use RTCP Receiver Reports to do this, as does  
Quicktime.

>
>> I suppose that would be outside the scope of the RTP  
>> implementation, by the way. The best way to got these statistics  
>> is to poll your routers for IGMP membership via SNMP regularly.
>
>  Apparently this isn't straight forward - out network people can  
> only tell me which 'vlan' has a client listening, not how many are  
> down there. The required SNMP is there, but they have to write  
> something to fetch and process it.
>
>

                                  Regards
                                  Marshall Eubanks

T.M. Eubanks
e-mail : tme at multicasttech.com
http://www.multicasttech.com

America Free TV Video Service
http://www.americafree.tv

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