Not Enough Bandwidth to Access PeachStar
Video Streaming?Try a Caching Server

 George Roller, Media Center Coordinator
Tallulah Falls , GA

After attending a GaETC session describing the incredible resource PeachStar Video Streaming provides for education, we were determined to try to make Video Streaming available for our school. PeachStar Video Streaming allows Georgia’s teachers to access educational video clips with audio over the Internet free of charge. Tens of thousands of video clips comprising hundreds of videos are available from Georgia Public Broadcasting Education's video repository. The clips may be searched by grade, subject area, keyword, or Georgia Quality Core Curriculum (QCC) Standard. Teachers may select only those clips from a video that pertain to the standards they are teaching rather than watching an entire video. Some videos have accompanying teacher resources such as black line masters, pre-tests, post-tests, activities, etc. All videos are summarized. Additional videos are added each day.

Our problem with accessing the video streaming resources was that our Internet connection did not have enough bandwidth to provide numerous simultaneous media streams. Since our network had a capacity of about 50 times our Internet connection, having the PeachStar video clips cached on a server on our network looked like a possible solution to the Internet bandwidth problem.

The disk space requirements to cache all PeachStar video clips is great. We were advised to use a network attached storage device. A Dell 705N providing 360 gigabytes of space configured as a RAID 5 array was purchased. Server Manager software is scheduled to download new video releases on a daily basis.

Our IT department spent a considerable amount of time to find the correct network configuration and software combinations to successfully play the locally cached videos. In working through some of the problems, they found there were not many schools that were accessing the videos in this way.

Two advantages of having the videos cached on your local network are:

1. effectively there is no limit to the number of simultaneous PeachStar streams because bandwidth is not an issue
2. there is no buffering or breaks in the video stream while playing.

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