View from your desk

You can also view on your computer

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Introduction

It is also possible for you to watch these live broadcasts from your own computer using a program called VLC. This is powerful, yet easy to use, video viewer, that can be downloaded and installed on your computer to capture the video data stream on our network and on let you watch and hear it. The quality of the results that you will get will depend upon the speed of your computer and the graphics card that it has. It is expected that most computers that are 3 years old or less will perform adequately. The data stream is being multicast, which means that the data is only sent once no matter how many people are watching.

Download and installing VLC

VLC, or the Video Lan Client, is a project of the VideoLAN team at the Ecole Centrale Paris in France and assisting developers around the world. The team has made this freely available for download and use for a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows, MacOS and several versions of Linux. VLC is needed to watch the Jason broadcast and it is also a very useful tool to for watching a number of different video formats.

To download VLC to your computer, go to http://www.videolan.org and select the client appropriate for your operating system. After the download is complete, you can install it taking all the default options.

Running and testing VLC

VLC is a very flexible video media player with many, many options. The following steps are intended to guide through the specific steps needed to prepare to watch the type of video that will be used for the Jason multicast.

Start VLC (on Windows double click on the orange and white traffic cone like icon.)
Go the File menu on and select "Open Network Stream. . ."
In the window that then appears select the option "UDP/Multicast" and enter either
233.0.73.28 (Research Channel) or 233.0.73.29 (UWTV) as an IP address. The default port of 1234 is fine.
You should now by watching and hearing whatever presentations that these channels happen to be showing. The picture should be clear and free of video artifacts. If one of these addresses does not work, then try the other as occasionally one or the other is "off the air." These are much lower quality videos than will be sent from Jason, so if you computer has trouble displaying them, it is probably best to think about watching from one of the auditoriums.

Viewing the Jason multicast

After you have verified that VLC is working satisfactorily on your computer, you can try watching the channel that Jason will use even outside of the scheduled show times. It is not certain what you will see or even that anything will be showing. Much of the time, you will see a live, high definition video scene of the University of Washington campus accompanied by a local radio station. This is being multicast at the same resolution that will be used by Jason (20 Mbits/sec). It should be sharp and free of artifacts. If you a signifcant break up of the picture or large splotchy areas, it is likely that your computer cannot process this complex a video signal. Before giving up, however, try a while later or see if others are getting the same results as it could be that the technicians somewhere along the line are adjusting things.

To watch this high-definition video multicast follow the same steps 1-3 above except enter the IP address 233.0.73.26