How to prepare an MBone session as the sender

If you are planning an Mbone transmission you may wish to pursue the following procedure which has been useful to us during the recent years:

Check your machines and Mbone connectivity first. Are the tools installed correctly? Does the hardware work (video grabber, sound card, camera, microphone)? Is your machine connected to the Mbone? You should check all this at the location where the actual transmission will take place!
Schedule not only the actual event but also at least one test session. This means e.g. room reservations, etc. (See the article on Mbone debugging for details of the test session.)
Set up an SDR entry (see below) for your session and the test session. Choose a session name that starts with COST264. Use the same parameters (esp. TTL) as are planned for the actual transmission.
Announce your session on the COST mailing list together with the technical details of the transmission and the test session (SDR entries, addresses, times, etc.) Remind the participants of the importance of the test session.
Send a reminder on the day of the test session and another reminder on the day of your event.
Keep your equipment readily checked. (e.g. don't lend equipment between the test session and the event.)

How to set up an SDR entry

Unlike unicast addresses where the DNS structure provides a global naming mechanism no such tool exists with multicast addresses. However, the sdr-tool allows you to advertise your session by regularly broadcasting session details in the Mbone. This broadcast mechanism has two important implications: Firstly, a client cannot actively retrieve the session information but has to wait until the next broadcast (usually a few minutes depending on packet loss). Secondly, session announcements are only broadcast while your sdr is running. If you stop it, e.g. by logging off from your machine the broadcast is stopped as well.

Please remember these crucial details: the sdr mechanism only works properly if you set up the announcement in time and keep the tool running until after the session. (Luckily sdr caches all its entries so you don't need to re-enter all the data when you restart the tool. Hence don't panic if you find that sdr is no longer running on your machine. Just restart it.)

For the same reasons (broadcast intervals) participants of your session have to start their sdr in time as well. Only if they can't see your announcement after 5 minutes you can assume a problem with the announcement.

In order to announce your session please pursue the following procedure:

Start sdr and click on the menue item new - create session. You will be presented with a sequence of dialogs:

First enter the name of your session and a short description. This could be the talk's abstract. It is convenient to choose a session name that starts with COST264 since it helps other participants to find your entry in their potentially long list of sessions.
Choose the session type. For a normal talk this should be broadcast. (This has no technical implications but helps the users to find interesting session.
Set up the session's time-table. Remember that you also want to schedule at least one test session!
Set up the session's distribution scope, its so-called TTL (time to live). If you are sure that all systems involved are able to deal with administrative scope you should choose that option. Otherwise select TTL scope and check the appropriate scope. As agreed on the Pisa meeting COST sessions should be transmitted with world scope.
Create transmission groups for all media types that will be used during the session by clicking on the respective buttons. The sdr-tool will then automatically create all addresses and parameters that you see in the screenshot below. You may change these parameters if required.
Add your contact information, i.e. e-mail address and phone number:
Finally, you may check again all the information that you have provided and then create the session by clicking accept: