[geeks] Where is everyone.

[Dave McGuire]

On Thursday, September 26, 2002, at 08:11 PM, Bill Bradford wrote:
>> this year it's being done online.  By me.  And I don't know the first
>> thing about streaming media.
>>   At least, I didn't until three weeks ago.
>
> Realproducer^H^H^HHelix is *really* easy to setup.

   Yup, it is.

   Unless, of course, you're doing it by remote hands in twenty cities, 
under at least five different operating systems, with COMPLETE IDIOTS 
on the other end (well, some of them anyway).  And oh by the way some 
of them are running RealProducer 8.  And oh by the way some of them are 
behind firewalls, and still others are behind NAT.  And oh by the way 
there's also the server, up in Maryland, that I had to provide (both 
the machine, the place to run it, and the connectivity)...it's an 
E420r, running Solaris7 (existing installation)...and Helix Universal 
Server Solaris7-specific distribution works fine, except for live 
streaming...which just plain Doesn't Work, but Real Networks doesn't 
seem to know about that little issue.  So I get to remotely load 
Solaris8 on the machine, (to duplicate the server configuration that I 
have running here on my network, which works fine) but there's no copy 
of Solaris8 at the facility in Maryland.  So I talk Big Mike into 
leaving it on his front porch to be picked up, and then the folks at 
the facility set up another system that I can log into and use kermit 
to get to the E420r's console port to do the OS installation.
So then after the OS is reloaded, we find out that Helix (a.k.a. Real9) 
"account-based push" (the new, default protocol for Producer) just 
"doesn't quite work", so we experimentally determined that everyone 
needs to set up Producer to use "legacy mode", emulating the transfer 
method of Real7 and Real8.  Except when you do that, the URL changes 
from rtsp://blah/broadcast/foo.rm to rtsp://blah/encoder/foo.rm for no 
particular reason.  And I've never seen ANY of this software before, 
much less know enough about it to ALSO be the tech support guy for 
twenty computer neophytes spread all across the US.

   No, there was nothing "easy" about this...of that I can assure you.

        -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                 "Dammit, now I wants me some
St. Petersburg, FL             livers 'n gizzards."    -Bill Bradford