In a demonstration of the expanding capabilities of the Internet, college students in the United States and Britain debated each other Tuesday using live video transmitted on the network. The debate pitted a team from the University of Vermont against a team from the English-Speaking Union, an educational organization headquartered in London. The two teams discussed the pros and cons of technology, with the Americans arguing that new technology is harmful and the British taking a pro-technology position. For the full article, See: http://www.chronicle.com/free/2000/03/2000031502t.htm For the associated Debate web page, see: http://www.uvm.edu/livedebate Here's the technical details left out of the Chronicle article... First off, take a look at the debate page referenced above. Note the left and right hand QT windows. Viewers used this page to see both debate teams at once. We specifically chose QuickTime for this project over competing technologies (RealVideo) because the competing technologies won't allow clients to show two simultaneous video windows. Bad technologies, bad -- bad! We are also pretty dedicated Mac heads when it comes to anything requiring video, and the other guys Macintosh software, well, sucks. Our broadcast setup: o Macintosh PowerBook G3/400 (Note that any iMac would work just as well) o XLR8 Interview USB video capture device ($99) o Sony DV Camcorder ($999) 1) Note that ANY camcorder would have worked. We did not use the DV features of the camcorder (you may ask me why). We just connected its analog S-Video output to the USB device 2) Note that the XLR8 and camcorder could be replaced by a Logitech QuickCam or Ariston USB camera, each around $99 3) In our first stunning leap of faith, we used the Interview 2.0 BETA 9 software. I love using beta software for "production" jobs! o Sorenson Broadcaster 1.0 software $199 Thus, anyone could build a similar setup for less than $1500. Our receiving setup o Macintosh PowerBook G3/300 o Sharp LCD projector On our end, we just used QuickTime player to watch the UK team, rather than the web page. This allowed us to blow up the 160x120 pixel image to near full screen, creating that "in theater" effect. The local TV stations loved it, since it gave them something to film for their News at 11. Note that if we really had to, we could have watched the UK team on the broadcasting Mac, too. In fact, in my role as technical director, I did. We streamed at the default 28.8 settings, since we wanted to try and squeeze the two streams out to 56K modem users. Thus, the G3/400 had CPU cycles to burn. I was constantly afraid, though -- whenever I switched applications between Sorenson, QuickTie Player, and Netscape -- that the PowerBoook would crash and burn. Instead, it worked like a charm. The two teams setup presented an interesting challenge for sound. We didn't have any fancy microphones on our end, so whenever the UVM team finished speaking, I yanked out the mike connection from the PowerBook. This was so that when the UK team spoke, our mike wouldn't pick up their voices and re-transmit them in an endless feedback loop. The UK teams wasn't always so good about switching off their mike. Our server setup UVM streamed to a QuickTime Streaming Server (QTSS) on a 400 or 450MHz G3 mini-tower running OS/X. In a second leap of faith, we just updated to version 2.0 of QTSS last week. In a third and fourth leap of faith, we then relayed that stream to a small Sun sparcStation running the Darwin Open Software implementation of QTSS, also version 2.0. We just complied and installed that just last week. We then popped open that machine a couple of hours before the event and installed another 256Mb of RAM, and hoped that it wouldn't fail (it didn't). The ESU/UK team streamed their video to a server at http://www.livetx.com/, a UK streaming server companyWe sent our original stream to the Apple, and then "relayed" that stream to the Sun. We had hoped to relay the UK stream to our Apple, too, so that we could watch them and they could watch us from the Apple, and the rest of the world on this side of the Atlantic could watch from the Sun, to help ensure connectivity in the event of excessive demand. We ran out of time before we got all the relaying stuff worked out (Note to Apple: make this easier than qtssrelay.conf files!). Those interested in the "ideal" networking diagram are referred to: http://www.uvm.edu/livedebate/debate.gif Faculty interested in pursuing similar endeavors are encouraged to contact the author directly.

| Wesley Alan Wright                    |
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