multicast.org.uk

The BBC Multicast trial website has now split up TV and Radio into two separate sections and is offering links to a number of commercial radio stations, as well as BBC National and World Service streams.

Multicast streams from the following providers are now available:

• BBC National Stations
• BBC World Service
• Virgin Radio
• EMAP
• GCap

A total of 34 multicast radio streams are now available.

Comments(0)

There have been a number of multicast beacons developed over the years; dbeacon is the latest offering.

dbeacon is a Multicast Beacon written in C++. The main purpose of a beacon is to monitor other beacon’s reachability and collect statistics such as loss, delay and jitter between beacons. dbeacon support both IPv4 and IPv6 multicast, collecting information using both Any Source Multicast (ASM) and Source-Specific Multicast (SSM).

The difference between dbeacon from many previous beasons is that it is a peer-to-peer system - each host running dbeacon is equal and there is no master server. Each host has the option of running the web frontend to monitor statistics. Unlike previous beacons, dbeacon does not send out pseudo RTP packets and instead uses its own protocol.

Homepage: fivebits.net/proj/dbeacon/

Comments(3)

SSMping is an excellent tool for checking multicast connectivity. Pings are sent back from the server using both unicast and multicast, so also confirms that the remote host is alive.

ssmping is a tool for checking whether one can receive Source Specific Multicast from a given host. If a host runs ssmpingd, users on other hosts can use the ssmping client tool to test whether they can receive SSM from the host. Another tool called asmping is also provided to check whether can receive ASM.

Homepage: www.venaas.no/multicast/ssmping

Comments(3)