CastGate

CastGate is an attempt from the ETRO-TELE research group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel to break the chicken and egg problem of multicast adaption on the internet.

Although multicast allows an internet user to receive rich media and other content without placing a high burden on the net, it is still virtually unavailable to normal internet users. The CastGate project tries to fix this by allowing end users to connect through an automatically configured tunnel network over networks which do not natively support multicast.The idea behind this is that if more users have multicast capability, more content providers will see the benefit of streaming content over multicast.If enough content providers and users are using this service, then more internet service providers will start to enable multicast natively to their customers.

CastGate supplies a software client for both Windows and Linux to connect to the CastGate tunnel network.It also supplies tools to add tunnel servers and tools to receive SAP announcements from the multicast network with video and audio streams.

External links

* [http://www.castgate.net/ CastGate] : General information
* [http://www.castgate.net/download.htm CastGate Download] : Download links to clients

ee also

* IP Multicast
* IP Tunnel