XMI Sports Webcast - good? bad? indifferent?

[billhoward]

Note that "Webcast" rhymes with "half-fast":

It only took 20 minutes and two computers to get a working feed.

XMI's feed dropped off or froze 4-5 times in the first two periods. Based on what I got to see of the game and the red light going on behind the RPI goal, it appears to be a 1-0 lead, Cornell, not 3-0. Sheesh.

There is a way to get instant replay on the Webcast. My first PC finally came back to life and picked up the video feed. But it was about 15 seconds behind the feed. So you can see the goal the second time around. We'll see if I'm charged for zero, one, or two streams.

You can see the goal the second time around (if you miss it the first time) ... assuming the camera is following the puck. When the puck goes from in front of the net to the corner, or corner to in front of the net, it's as if the camera operator notices it's moved, puts down his Pepsi and then leisurely pans. Once or twice is understandable - it's a $5 program, not a $50 HBO PPV boxing championship - but this is like every third time they're late following the puck. I'm guessing it's because they're using small viewfinder cameras and it's hard to follow the puck. But still ...

Hey, it's $5 for an audio feed, $5 for a video feed .

[edit] [update] The first feed dropped and when I reconnected, it wouldn't accept the same username which I suppose makes sense so one username and password doesn't feed the whole Cornell community.

[DeltaOne81]

Yes, the camera men are pretty bad. Other than that, what do you expect of a webcast? Its great that we get anything, and as big hockey fans, we can watch hockey and know where the puck is without having to see it. Are you going to get TV quality? or ability to see the puck in the net? no?

But the other problems might be your connection or something, man. My feed is to nearly 2 hours without any drops, freezes, or other glitches.

And yeah, replay would be nice.

[ben03]

[Q]DeltaOne81 Wrote:
Yes, the camera men are pretty bad. [/q]
they’re not pretty bad … they just plain suck

[billhoward]

Isn't XMI (or its predecessor) an offshoot of Syracuse? Doesn't Syracuse have a school of communications? What are they teaching there?

[ben03]

the feed is a joke tonight

[puff]

my feeds been "continuous" for the last 2:17. But it has a lil bit of lag every now and then. audio stays for the most part continuous, the video just seems to freeze everynow and then.
Camera is pretty jerky too.

BUT

It allows me to watch hockey, so as long as i got a good enough feed to see atleast kinda whats going on, i'm not complaining (too much). I find hooking my computer to my tv gives much better picture quality (not only size). Kinda reminds me of like highschool basketball/football film jobs (i used to run the basketball actually ;-) )

[DeltaOne81]

Anyone who's having problems with video jerkiness or cutting out, run this:
http://reviews.cnet.com/Bandwidth_meter/7004-7254_7-0.html

And don't worry about doing nothing at the same time, we want typical bandwidth, not maximum, so feel free to keep reading eLF

[DisplacedCornellian]

I think the problems with the feed dropping off were on your end, Bill.  Once I got the video up and running it was fine for the whole game (aside from the shoddy camera work).

[billhoward]

Could well be that I dropped the feed, not that XMI failed to get me the feed. Although the couldn't-process-payment lag of ~5-7 minutes, my credit is good (good enough to handle five bucks on a Friday night), that was part of the lag, plus another 3-4 minutes running around to make sure I was in fact using the right password and credit card.

My overall impression is that getting a live Webcast and then switching the feed to your TV set is still something that most people are not going to put up with. Especially not when pop-ups keep coming up on a supposedly full screen view (thanks to MSN Messenger for reporting every two minutes that it had crashed and did I want to notify Microsoft).

I really am hoping for a feed closer to standard-def TV in a year or two and I'd be willing to put up with a reasonable amount of buffering, even a minute or two, even if it meant eLynah would post the score before I saw it.

Also, I really want instant replay.

[puff]

I agree, instant replay would be key. You see something like the awesome goal last night, and you're like wow, I want to see that again. But you don't. ::uhoh::

[DeltaOne81]

Buffering doesn't really help the quality situation much. Its good to allow you some margin for error in case the feed drops out or bandwidth slows down, but its not a long term solution over a 2 hour period. You would still need the more information coming in all along. 2 minutes of buffering, distributed over 2 hours would give you 1/60 (1.67%) extra data for each frame, which wouldn't even be a 1.67% increase in quality as qualitatively observed (heck, you probably wouldn't notice any difference at all).

Besides that's not how buffering works anyway. Its not intended to allow you to stream higher quality video later on, that's a risky proposition to try to make that work out. Instead its intended to let you see the same quality video without interruption. And if you did do it for the higher quality, then you would lose the non-interruption feature and you'd just be complaining about that :-P.

The only way to really get better quality video is 1) a better codec (and I guarantee you you can beat WMP) or 2) higher bandwith. Personally my connection can do 4 to 5x what XMI streams at, but I'm not going to force them to stream that much more bandwidth than they already are. That would raise the cost if not choking off other watchers.

[billhoward]

Is this a matter of semantics? XMI or another provider has raised the quality level (so to speak) knowing that you have a 384Kbps connection not 56K and the buffering keeps the video coming when, as happens, the pipe hiccups. I think of quality as being the frame rate and the resolution and the lack of pixellation and the lack of dropouts or frozen frames. Over the almost 10 years broadband has been available, the max speed and the sustained average throughput have gotten better. And we ain't seen nothing yet.

Can you beat the WMV format for motion video? The people in the video industry centered in San Fernando who care most about state of the art video quality over mid-bandwidth pipes are pretty close to unanimous in supporting WMV. (If you doubt it do a google search on the name of any video format .and. "adult entertainment".)  

One thing that would get MS to improve the quality would be to announce a Firefox branded codec.

[puff]

I find most of my pixilation comes when i'm looking at the computer monitor. On my tv it seems much clearer(lacks pixilation for the most part) Is it hardware issues? Video Display issues?

I'm no expert on computers and all that, I'm just wondering bill if its your monitor?
My S-video -> TV connection improves the picture from my laptop monitor greatly (atleast 3 or 4 times better).

[billhoward]

[Q]puff Wrote:

 I find most of my pixilation comes when i'm looking at the computer monitor. On my tv it seems much clearer(lacks pixilation for the most part) Is it hardware issues? Video Display issues? I'm no expert on computers and all that, I'm just wondering bill if its your monitor? My S-video -> TV connection improves the picture from my laptop monitor greatly (atleast 3 or 4 times better).[/q]

Yes, use SVideo out from your PC not RCA composite (the yellow round connector) is the way to go. But SVideo doesn't make the picture "better." It just just keeps it degrading any further. The Webcast looks good on a TV or big screen TV because TV is so low=quality, about 400 lines of resolution with a tailwind. And you're sitting back 5-8-10 feet, not 2 feet away. That hides some quality problems.

No matter how far away you sit, the image is still almost black and white. (You see red on the scoreboard and when the goal light goes on. Damn. I've been waiting fo the goal light to goal light go go for a while (at the Union end)). Only on the closesups do you see the jerseys have red in them.

This is the classic dancing bear (not big red bear) syndrome.