Come to Daddy

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041028.html

October 28, 2004
Come to Daddy
How Ken Schaffer's ME2TV (or Something Just Like It, But Cheaper) Will Change Television Forever
By Robert X. Cringely

"But what blew me away this week when I saw a demo of TV2ME in Schaffer's cluttered New York apartment was the quality of the image. Sending live TV over the Internet is a very difficult thing to do, especially over distances like that from Moscow to New York. There are live TV feeds from Moscow available today, and they look terrible no matter how much bandwidth you have. But Schaffer's feed, running at an average of 384 kilobits-per-second, looks like TV. When you change channels to any of the 60 or so on the Moscow cable system, it takes about 10 seconds to rebuffer, and then you have TV. Amazing!

To put this achievement in perspective, I have running in my home in Charleston both Windows and Linux-based PVRs that play through Hauppauge Media MVP set top boxes. This is a Hauppauge WinTV250 PVR capture board running on a fast AMD system with half a gig of DDR RAM and a 125 gig 7200-rpm disk drive. All components are matched and from the same manufacturer, all video encoding and decoding is done in hardware, network connections are all Ethernet, AND I CAN'T WATCH LIVE TV OVER THIS NETWORK. I can easily access my vast collection of pre-recorded Dragon Tales, Caillou, and Arthur episodes, but live TV bombs out even though I'm capturing and sending at two megabits-per-second over a two-hop network no more than 60 feet long.

Ken Schaffer, on the other hand, is capturing at 384 kilobits-per-second using hardware encoding only on the sending end (the receiver is software-only) and he can watch perfectly viewable television that has run through 20+ hops from Moscow or Bangkok or any of a number of other cities where he has friends and customers.

Given that he has no way of guaranteeing Quality of Service, I think this performance is amazing. But given his track record, I can't discount the demonstration. Like his wireless mikes, Schaffer attributes the quality to how he preprocesses the video signal before it enters the MPEG-4 encoder chip. I don't know what he does, but it seems to work."