HARDRONIC'96
CERN Restaurant One: 19-20 July '96
How to watch the Hardronic Festival over the MBONE.

MBONE stands for the Multicast Backbone on the Internet. It is used for interactive multimedia broadcasting, and mainly intended for video conferencing. In some occsions though it is also used to broadcast shows and special events. The CERN Hardronic Festival is one of these special events.

How to Watch

  1. Make sure you have access to the MBONE. Ask your site network manager, your service provider, your webmaster etc. if your internet connection is enabled to receive MBONE broadcast. If you are in CERN or other large site with high internet activity, you are most likely NOT to have MBONE access, as this would easily saturate the local bandwidth.
  2. If you do, then check the MBONE Home Page for all the info you need. In particular you want to download the necessary audio and video tools.
    On a Unix workstation, these are: Click HERE to get acces to the proper tool for your platform.
All this may not seem very simple, but the MBONE is not the Web! Hopefully it will get better in the future.

What will you see

The MBONE is not a cable TV. Its quality may be better or worse depending on a number of factors linked to the carrier and to the quality of your connection. At most, you may hope to get some 10-15 frames/sec on a 320x240 pixels window, with an audio signal at 22KHz. This is not too bad for a computer (similar to CD-ROM standards) but not compareable to TV or video. My best advise, if you have MBONE connection is: get the tools now and take a look at the broadcasts currently on.

Hope you will enjoy the show and... good luck!


Silvano de Gennaro

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