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DCU Lets Sun Stream in
| Dublin
City University has chosen Sun to provide it with video streaming
facility as well as indexing , editing and storage capabilities
for digital video. The sun platform will be used in the School of Computing for storing and streaming of lectures
as well as digitally indexing content. 'We will be using the video
server to record guest lectures initially and later on will record
high interest lectures,' explains Professor Smeaton. 'This
content will then be available to approximately 400 different
workstations in the School. Students use a web-based browser
to identify the material they want to view and then simply stream
it onto their desktops.'
Each of the 400-odd workstations in the School of Computing runs both Solaris and Windows NT but as the service is delivered via a web browser either operating systems can be used. The workstations are PCs connected via a Gigabit Ethernet backbone.
|
Sun shines on DCU (l-r) Alan Murray, Sun academic business manager for BCS Computers; Aidan Furlong, country manager for Sun Microsystems; Professor Alan Smeaton, head of School of Computing
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| 'We
are also working on an innovative digital indexing project called
Físchlár," said Smeaton. 'The project name comes from the
Irish for 'video' combined with 'blackboard'. We capture
television programmes in digital format, index using tools we
have developed ourselves and then allow the viewer to browse rapidly
or search for material of interest without having to watch the
whole programme."
The second key use of the video server in DCU is in the School of Communications. Here students record large amounts of digital video material before transferring it to the video server. They can then download it onto desktop machines for editing where the resulting video length may contract from 30 minutes to less than three, but traditionally storage and manipulation of the data had now placed the greatest strain on the University storage capabilities. "We have installed a Sun 4500 with six processors, 4 Gbyte of memory and 8 Tbyte of storage," said Alan Murray, Sun academic business manager for BCS Computers. 'This is ideal for the college with its heavy demand on storage and streaming. Infact, we can store upwards of Tbyte of archive material at any one time.' The Sun academic programme was responsible for partial sponsorship of the new video-streaming server. Article from ComputerScope July/August 2000 |