SFU MBone Tools Listing

Brought to you by:

Academic Computing Services
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C.
Canada V5A 1S6

There are several applications needed to receive or provide content on the MBone. The front-end is called the Session Directory (sdr). It collects advertisements for MBone sessions and also allows a user to generate their own advertisements. Advertisements contain information about the content of a session (audio streams, video streams, etc), detailed schedule information, and user contact information.

Sdr also handles launching the other applications when a user chooses to receive a particular stream. Currently, the only other applications available on all major computing platforms are vic (for video streams) and vat (for audio streams)

The underlying protocols upon which these applications are based are still being written. As such, all of the applications that we are offering here are beta. The non-unix versions have only very recently appeared and are somewhat rough around the edges. They do provide base functionality though

Windows95/Windows NT MBone Tools

There are several version of the tools for PCs, depending on your OS and configuration:

W95-8bit.zip	Windows95 package. Supports 8, 24 or 32 bit colour modes only. Contains newest versions of all betas. Video tool supports transmission from certain video capture accessories. This SDR will not run under NT. See note below for installation instructions
W95-16bit.zip	Windows95 package. Supports 256 or 65536 colours ONLY and uses older video code. Does not support video transmission. This SDR will not run under NT. See note below for installation instructions.
NT-8bit.zip	Windows NT or 95 package. Supports 8, 24 or 32 bit colour modes only. SDR tool is native Windows code (faster, cleaner), but lacks some features and is based on older source code. It will, however, run on either OS. Video tool supports transmission. See note below for installation
NT-16bit.zip	Windows NT or 95 package. Supports 256 or 65536 colours ONLY (8 & 16 bit) and uses older video code. Does not support video transmission. See SDR note for NT-8bit.zip above. See note below for installation instructions.

Notes:

All packages support transmission of audio on machines equipped with soundcards & mics
To determine how many colours you're currently using, right-click on your desktop (for Win95 and NT4.0), select properties, then select "settings". Your colour count should be displayed in the lower-left area.
After unzipping the downloaded file, place all of the resulting files into a directory in your path. If using Windows95, you should have a directory called C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND which will be in your path. Under WindowsNT, place the files in C:\WINNT (assuming that's where NT is installed)
If you choose to use the Win95-only SDR (sdrwin.exe in the "W95-xxxx" packages), you should:
1) Add to autoexec.bat (note forward slash): [Substitute "userid" with your campus computing account ID]
SET HOME = C:/HOME/userid
SET USER = userid
2) create the following directories
C:\HOME
C:\HOME\userid
C:\HOME\userid\SDR
C:\HOME\userid\SDR\CACHE
3) Reboot your PC to activate the changes made to autoexec.bat
To start viewing the MBone, run "sdrwin" if you downloaded the Win95 package or "sd" if you downloaded the WinNT package

Mac MBone Tools

Apple has been doing their own development on MBone tools for the Mac platform. They've named their product QuickTime TV. Their product consists of two parts - the QTTV Session Directory and the QTTV Watcher. They have offered a BETA version of their MBone Audio/Video client free and unsupported to the public. This beta expires Sept 19th, 1997. Here are Apple's specified system requirements and installation instructions

Minimum System Requirements

Power Macintosh or 68040 Macintosh computer (Mbone audio/video compressors require Power Macintosh processors)
System Software System 7.5.3 Update 2.0 or greater.
16 Megabytes of memory
OpenTransport 1.1.1 or greater.
QuickTime 2.5 or greater.

Installing QuickTime TV Client

Follow these steps to install the QuickTime TV Client software.

Download the install package (618K file).
After you download the software, locate the file called QTTV15b2.sit.hqx. Drop the file on Stuffit Expander (version 4.0 or later) to decode it.
(If necessary) Locate the file called QTTV15b2.sit and double click the file to decompress it.
You should now see a folder on your desktop called "1.5b2". Please study the Read Me called "About QuickTime TV Client" inside the folder to properly install and use your software.

Running the QuickTime TV Client

To keep track of MBone session announcements, you must have the QuickTime Session Directory running. To view all sessions, select File -> New RTP Channel. It may take several minutes for sessions to start appearing. When you find the session you want, simply double-click on it. We've experienced some problems with tbe beta version not automaticly running the viewer. If this happens, manually start the QTTV Viewer (WITHOUT quitting the Session Directory), then select QTTV Viewer's File & New RTP Channel menu option. You'll see the same list of sessions, but double-clicking on a session here always works.

If the session is currently transmitting anything, it will take 10-20 seconds for something to appear.

System Updates

If you need to upgrade the system software on your Mac, updates are available on the SFU server SFU_General in the Pub_Files_Here volume. SFU_General can be found using the chooser & appleshare in the printing.sfu.ca zone. System Software updates are in Mac -> Apple Computer -> System Software. Open Transport updates are in
Mac -> Apple Computer -> Networking -> Open Transport. Quicktime updates are in Mac -> Apple Computer -> QuickTime.