ACTLab peer-to-peer TV betas proceeding smoothly, radio station guide forthcoming

Austin (TX) - The heroic engineers at the Foundation for Decentralization Research - s the students in the Media Studies department at the University of Texas at Austin have come to be known - are well on their way to fulfilling their mission of building ACTLab TV to give individuals the means to become content channel providers.

The first demo streams - both audio+video and audio only - are being made available now through ACTLab’s servers. They’re relatively short, and may be slightly more entertaining than the rotating pictures of Felix the Cat that characterized the first demo TV broadcasts of the 1920s. Still, their main purpose is to demonstrate the effectiveness of Swarmcast, Onion Networks’ P2P stream downloading system. Unlike conventional P2P, which focuses on the transmission of files, Swarmcast enables the throughput of data streams, allowing videos and audiocasts to be seen and heard during the decentralized download process.

Today, as ACTLab’s director, Brandon Wiley told Tom’s Hardware Guide, his group is preparing to release the first draft of ACTLab’s radio station guide, which instructs individuals as to how they can acquire - without expense - the equipment and some of the content necessary for them to produce a recorded, fully-licensed Internet "broadcast." "It’s a pretty good guide," said Wiley, "not just because it tells the technical aspect of how to encode your stuff, but it talks about the various net labels and free content that’s out on the Internet, to find content for your station." So-called "net labels" provide MP3s - some for free, to promote the others they sell commercially. Magnatune is one such net label that will be providing content for ACTLab TV, Wiley told us.

By the end of this week, the lab should be providing much longer demo streams. "We’ve got, for the first release, 30 hours of video and 30 hours of audio that we’re going to be streaming," said Wiley. "It’s all going to be very high-quality - DVD quality is our goal, with H.264 encoding. For this next release, what we want to show everybody is that we are doing live, instantaneous streaming, but at DVD quality."

In this reporter’s own tests of ACTLab TV, the Swarmcast plug-in seems to work quite well. One problem - which I believe other Windows users may face - is that Apple’s QuickTime, especially recent versions, insist on trying to decode the MPEG-4 video stream, and will fail. ACTLab’s stream is encoded using H.264, one free codec for which, called "ffdshow," is installed with the ACTLab software. My observation has been that QuickTime is being launched before ffdshow has a chance to kick in, so some Registry hacking may be required before I can see the video portion of ACTLab’s program. The MP3 audio stream, on the other hand, plays brilliantly through both Firefox and IE 6.