We focused our grading on four major areas--stream quality, management, features and price.
Stream quality, our most heavily weighted area, included image appearance and stability. The latter is particularly important, as frequent rebuffering and lost connections frustrate users and hinder streaming video's acceptance. Even a sharp picture looks terrible if the stream pauses to buffer every few seconds.
We didn't give extra credit for supporting Linux, Solaris or other Unix systems on the server or client side. Only Apple's product works on Mac OS X Server. Other platforms supported by Darwin aren't eligible for Apple technical support, but Apple hosts several discussion forums and mailing lists on other products. Apple had no objection to our testing Darwin under Windows. The server is available under the Apple Public Source License. Microsoft's streaming server works only on Windows 2003 Server. The products from Adobe and RealNetworks both support Linux servers. On the client side, all the products we tested support Windows and Mac. RealPlayer is available for Linux and Solaris. Portions of Real's Helix server are available under an open-source license. Flash 7 is available on Linux but Flash 8 isn't yet.
If there were an Oscar for most random images in a test video, we'd submit ours to the academy. Recorded on to a mini-DV camera, our high-motion movie featured fire, running water, detailed close-ups of local flora and fauna, a busy roadway, fast motion over the ground and text overlays, and a head shot of a miniature dachshund.
We digitally imported the raw footage into Apple's iMovie, edited the content and digitally exported it back to the DV camera. We used the exported content to encode all the videos, with separate Mac and Windows boxes for encoding the test videos. Per our request, each vendor specified codec and encoding settings. Darwin Streaming Server has a wide range of codecs and options, but Apple told us to use H.264 for all our tests. We encoded the video in three bit rates for each vendor: 1 Mbps, 768 Kbps and 256 Kbps. Each product had its own computer as a streaming server and a separate computer and monitor as the client. We used identical hardware for each product, and the monitors' contrast, brightness and refresh rates were the same. We used a Shunra Storm to simulate a typical LAN, as well as good and poor broadband connections between the client and server.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
