World Wide Conferencing Network
WWCN is a system that provides multimedia conferencing services on a world-wide scale. It has been optimized for realtime data delivery: music, voice, video, pictures, text, software updates, and so on. To cope with today's bandwidth scarcity, it implements a reliable "multicasting" technology (one to many data communication) over standard TCP (internet) connections.
WHAT IS WWCN?
Introduction
White papers
HOWTO...
connect
tune in
build a network?
SOFTWARE
multimedia players
multimedia producers
chat clients
server software
World Wide Conferencing Network
As its name suggests, WWCN is a system intended for conferencing purposes on a world wide scale. "Conferencing" can be understood as chatting, but WWCN is capable of much more than that. It has been built to efficiently transport multimedia data, so that you can also run a radio station on WWCN, or provide a news service for millions of users. Just as with IRC, a conferencing channel ("chat room") has a name, and you can tune into a channel by joining the channel. You can use WWCN as if it were an IRC network (yes, standard IRC clients do work on WWCN) but then you will not be able to listen to audio transmissions and all the other exciting things that are going on.The development of WWCN is a process that has been going on for over 7 years now. It was originally intended as a replacement protocol for IRC, but the IRC users and admins were happy with all the netsplits and outages, and did not see the added value of WWCN. So recently the multimedia promises that WWCN has carried since its inception have been made a bit more concrete. A few tools (fifo123, xmit and recv) were written to facilitate sending and receiving arbitrary (realtime) data over WWCN, enabling it to be used as a convenient multimedia infrastructure for transporting radio- and maybe even TV stations, while still offering the same old text-based conferencing possibilities for your daily chatting needs.
WWCN was written and conceived by Gerrit Hiddink.