Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) yesterday introduced legislation that would make it easier for phone companies to offer video programming, but it faces a tough fight.

The nation's largest telephone companies, including AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. , have been pressing lawmakers to streamline the laborious process of getting local franchises from thousands of municipalities to offer video over new, high-speed networks.

The Stevens bill would still require phone companies to seek approvals from local authorities but would impose a "shot clock" on the process, requiring municipalities to act on requests within 30 days. If they fail to act, a franchise is automatically granted with strict guidelines on the fees and other terms.

In contrast, a House bill creates a national franchising process, relieving phone companies of the obligation to go to each municipality for permission.

Regulatory analysts said they thought there was a less than 50-50 chance of telecom legislation becoming law this year because of the range of issues addressed by the Senate bill, the potential difficulty of reconciling it with the narrower House version passed last week and the short legislative calendar ahead of the November midterm elections.

The two versions also differ on two major issues: payments into a fund that guarantees universal telephone service and "net neutrality" provisions to address whether phone and cable companies may discriminate against the traffic of rivals on their networks.

While the House bill is silent on the issue of universal service, the Senate bill would require all telecommunications providers -- including those offering cable modem service and voice over Internet protocol phone service -- to pay into the fund.

On net neutrality, the Senate bill merely requires the Federal Communications Commission to do an annual study on the flow of information over the Internet and make recommendations. Its stance was weaker than the House bill, which itself did not go far enough for net neutrality proponents.

The Stevens bill also has provisions touching on municipal broadband networks, first-responder communications, regional sports networks, child pornography and consumer education about the transition to digital TV broadcasts.

While he co-sponsored the Stevens bill, Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), the committee's ranking minority member, said he had "numerous, substantive objections" to the legislation.

"We cannot ignore concerns about the potential for discrimination by network operators, but the draft appears to do just that by failing to create enforceable protections that will ensure network neutrality," Inouye said in a statement.

Paul L. Glenchur, who tracks telecom regulatory developments for the Stanford Washington Research Group, said it will be tough to get a law enacted this year.

"There are plenty of things working against it, but I think people dismiss the notion that this could actually pass at their peril," he said.

I had an MPEG1 recording from 1996 done on a Xing Streamworks encoder prototype, based on a 486 CPU with an Intel I960 DSP Card. I had made some simple tools to record and playback these multicast stream called capt and loop. Download here

But even this code dates back to earlier experiments with Cell-B at Sun Microsystems in 1990-1992 trying to stream Multicast Video across there private global network.

It really brought back a lot of memories. Expecially when I was able to replay the Xing stream in VLC. The audio didn't come up but still, it worked!!

One thing many of you may not realize is that this type of RTP streaming in the basis inside VOIP and Video Confrencing systems, SIP and H.323 for the Audio and Video if there is a video channel.
Both use RTP/RTSP, where the RTP is UDP networkp packets and the RTSP is just for control.

I was really suprise to find out the OCAP standard for Cable TV boxes uses RTP/RTSP streams for there VOD over there DOCSIS protocol (IP over Cable)

Also 3GPP cell phone streaming use MPEG-4 over RTP/RTSP. The Windows Media Player, Quick Time player and Real Player, helix player all support standard RTP/RTSP streams as defined by the ISMA.

The VLC application though just did straight RTP with out the RTSP control session, so it's streams can not be played back in Media player or the like as is. I bet I could write a simple TCP client to do RTSP and have it work in Real, Quicltime and Media Player.

Anyhow both Real with there "Helix Universal. Server", and the Microsoft with there "Windows Media Server" that only comes with "Windows 2003 Server", or the older NT 4.0 installable package, well they both support there own propritary versions of RTP.

Real Media - rtsp://
Windows Media - mms://
Quick Time - rtsp://
Flash Communication - rtmp://

Real Player uses an older method where they download a .rm file and this points to a RTSP or there propritary pnm:// format.

The Darwin Streaming server is open source and will also stream Unicast RTP/RTSP, Both from a file or from Rebroadcasting a Multicast stream.
Which brings me to the next interesting thing. One of the lesser explained concepts. One of the older way to stream live video was to use and "encoder" then a "server" to the "client".
The Original Xing Streamworks that I worked on in 1996 did this, and most of the newer ones still do, (Helix,MSS, Darwin). The problem is then where do you get your live Multicast stream from. FFMPEG was also supposed to be able to but last time I tried it, it was broken. It looks like VLC could, but there aren't any setting to change the datarate and encoding. On the Mac there is the Apple Broadcaster that does this. If anyone know of a tool for windows or Linux that works with the DSS please let me know.

Another thing seldom talked about is Hint Tracks. When streaming a video file over RTP, such as MPEG2 or 4, many server such as the Darwin Streaming server need what's called a Hint track. Basically the compression software needs to indicate where each RTP (UDP) packet is to be broken off from what is a continuos stream of compressed video. Typically RTP packets are just regular UDP or Multicast UDP (just an altered MAC and IP address for these) that are around 1000 to 1300 Bytes long, the mtu's are around 1500 for the internet so these don't get broken up into smaller packets.

RFC 1889 RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications, 1996

RFC 2029 RTP Payload Format of Sun's CellB Video Encoding, 1996

RFC 1890 RTP Profile for Audio and Video Conferences with Minimal Control, 1996

RFC 2038 RTP Payload Format for MPEG1/MPEG2 Video , 1996

RFC 2250 RTP Payload Format for MPEG1/MPEG2 Video

Video Lan

Download multicast_tools

test3 Sample video clip recorded from a VLC multicast RTP stream.

V2V - Video Syndication Network

FLV format is better documented this time and includes data packet format.

Several notable things are included including details of the Sorenson variation of the H.263 video codec and the inclusion of ON2's VP6 video codec. I shocked that they did VP6 instead of VP7.

Flash 8 Goes Live with On2.s Live SDK for Flash

Some video files that are downloaded from these online video hosting sites may be in the format of Flash Video (.flv). For whatever reasons, such as prefer to view and store the videos in mpeg format, or want to play the offline video clips in portable player such as PSP and iPod, or simply don.t like to view it with FLV Player, then there is a need to convert the .flv video format to another format such as .avi, .mov, .wmv and .mpg. There are several tools and conversion utilities that can be used to do the media format conversion.

Riva FLV Encoder

Able to decode Flash Video into AVI, MPEG, Quicktime and WMV. The utility is capable to do the encoding into Flash Video too, and comes with a FLV Player. The conversion may have issue of audio codec cannot be transcoded.
Available here

Total Video Converter

A total solution to video conversion which supports reading, playing lots of video and audio formats and converting them to popular video formats.
Available here

Supported source/input file formats include:

Video Formats:
Rmvb(.rm,.rmvb), MPEG4(.mp4), 3gp(.3gp, 3g2), Game Psp(.psp), MPEG1(.mpg, mpeg), MPEG2 PS (.mpg, mpeg, vob), MPEG2 TS (DVB Transport Stream), Ms ASF(.asf, .wmv), Ms AVI(.avi), Macromedia Flash video FLV (.flv), Real Video (rm), Apple Quicktime(.mov), FLIC format(.fli, .flc), Gif Animation(.gif), DV (.dv), Video Formats Dx9 Directshow can open

Audio Formats:
CD audio(.cda), MPEG audio(.mp3, mp2), Ms WAV(.wav), Ms WMA(.wma), Real Audio (.ra), OGG(.ogg), Amr audio(.amr), AC3(.ac3), SUN AU format (.au), Macromedia Flash embedded audio(.swf), Audio Formats Dx9 Directshow can open

Game Video Formats:
Technologies format, used in some games(.4xm), Playstation STR, Id RoQ used in Quake III, Jedi Knight 2, other computer games format used in various Interplay computer games, Interplay MVE multimedia format used in Origin.s Wing Commander III computer game,WC3 Movie used in many Sega Saturn console games, Sega FILM/CPK Multimedia formats used in Westwood Studios games, Westwood Studios VQA/AUD Used in Quake II, Id Cinematic (.cin), used in Sierra CD-ROM games, Sierra VMD, used in Sierra Online games, .sol files, Electronic Arts Multimedia, Matroska used in various EA games; files have extensions like WVE and UV2 Nullsoft Video (NSV) format

And Total Video Converter able to convert any of the file formats above to the following video media formats, including of mobile videos or audios (mp4, 3gp, xvid, divx mpeg4 avi, amr audio) which are used by cellphone, PDA, PSP, iPod:

Video Formats:
MPEG4(.mp4), 3gp(.3gp, 3g2), Game Psp(.psp), MPEG1(.mpg, mpeg), NTSC, PAL DVD , SVCD and VCD mpeg, Ms Mpeg4 AVI(.avi), Divx AVI(.avi), Xvid AVI(.avi), H264 AVI(.avi), Mjpeg AVI(.avi), HuffYUV AVI(.avi), Swf Video(.swf) Flv Video (.flv) Gif Animation(.gif), Mpeg4 Mov(.mov), Apple Quicktime(.mov), FLIC format(.fli, .flc), Gif Animation(.gif), DV (.dv)

Audio Formats:
MPEG audio(.mp3, mp2), Ms WAV(.wav), Ms WMA(.wma), OGG(.ogg), Amr audio(.amr) on Cell phones, AC3(.ac3), SUN AU format (.au), m4a(mp4 audio)

eRightSoft SUPER - Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer

SUPER supports a wide variety of input/source file format to play or encode and decode without any additional third party software. It.s a GUI to ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, ffmpeg2theora & the theora/vorbis RealProducer plugIn. SUPER is a simple yet very efficient tool to convert (encode) or play any Multimedia file, and most video formats and also portable formats for PSP, iPod, PocketPC and NEC, Nokia, Siemens, SonyEricsson are supported.
Available here

MPlayer.s MEncoder

MEncoder is an all-purpose encoder that is part of MPlayer, a movie player which runs on many systems. It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs.

MEncoder is command-line based with limited GUI. It supports wide range of file formats as MPlayer, and it also enable format conversion to be done in x86, Unix, Linux, Red Hat, Mac OS X and other non-x86 system.
Available here

PSP Video 9

PSP Video 9 is a free PSP video conversion and management application. It can convert regular PC video files (avi, mpeg, flv etc) into PSP video files that can plays in PSP portable player, as well as manage/copy these PSP video files between your PC and PSP.
Available here

Videora iPod Converter

Videora iPod Converter is a free video conversion application that converts your regular PC video files (avi, mpeg, flv etc) into the proper video format that can plays on your iPod.
Available here

SWF to AVI

SWF ToolBox from Altima , Available here the quality of the output files is not that good (maybe you have to adjust some things in the preferences)

Other related Reading

Here is a Good thread on this at doom9

FLV to other... Revisited

ffmpeg -i input.avi -acodec mp3 output.flv

using other GNU software MEMCODER I can convert since and from many formats,example, to convert RealMedia to FLV

mencoder -ovc lavc input.rm -oac mp3lame -o temp.avi
and then

ffmpeg -i temp.avi -acodec mp3 output.flv

You can obtain most control with other parameters like output width and height, quality, compression, etc...

Formats supported of FFMPEG http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC16

http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net