Live video streaming for community networks, experimenting with peerstreamer on the Ninux community

Networks, due to the affinity to both technical and social characteristics of such networks. It can help binding together communities, it provides a good means for inclusion of people as well to deliver information and local events. Video streaming in community networks is still problematic; this work describes a project for the adaptation of PeerStreamer, an open source peer-to-peer video streaming platform, to an existing Community Network in the city of Florence, Italy. The paper exposes the motivations that make PeerStreamer a perfect match with the philosophy and the technical features of a community network and describes how the community network of Florence can be a very good testbed given the mixture of technical and social skills that animate it. The proposed adaptation and implementation exploits a so-far underused feature of PeerStreamer: the possibility of separating the streaming engine from the play-out part on different hosts. This feature makes it possible to install the streaming engine, which is very efficient and has a very small memory footprint, directly on the community network routing nodes, so that the streaming topology can be adapted to the community network topology by directly accessing routing information. On the other hand, the player can run on standard PCs and use standard streaming protocols to access the stream.

P2P Live video streaming could be a distinguishing feature of Community Networks, due to the affinity to both technical and social characteristics of such networks. It can help binding together communities, it provides a good means for inclusion of people as well as to deliver information and local events. Video streaming in community networks, however, is still problematic; this work describes how to customize Peer-Streamer, an open source P2P video streaming platform, to an existing Community Network in the city of Florence, Italy. The paper exposes the motivations that make Peer-Streamer a perfect match with the philosophy and the technical features of a community network and describes how the community network of Florence can be a very good testbed given the mixture of technical and social skills that animate it. The proposed adaptation and implementation exploits a so-far underused feature of PeerStreamer: the possibility of separating the streaming engine from the play-out part on different hosts. This feature makes it possible to install the streaming engine, which is very efficient and has a very small memory footprint, directly on the community network routing nodes, so that the streaming topology can be adapted to the community network topology by directly accessing routing information. On the other hand, the player can run on standard PCs and use standard interfaces to access the stream.