Connecting to an IP Broadcast Protocol

[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]

The first step of transmitting an enhancement to broadcast clients is to establish connections to the transport protocol, which can be a Microsoft Multicast Router, a LAN, or any other IP broadcast protocol.

The ipsend object operates the same regardless of the broadcast system that transmits the IP data. The IP broadcast system can correspond to a Microsoft® Multicast Router, a LAN multicast system, or any other IP-supporting protocol. The ipsend object simply sends the IP data to the specified addresses.

There are two types of connection settings for the ipsend object: global settings that apply to every type of transmission and settings that apply to a specific type of transmission such as announcements, triggers, or file downloads.

The address and broadcast time-to-live values for the network interface card (NIC) are global properties. Set the NIC address by setting a value for the ipsend.Netcard property. Set the time-to-live for your IP broadcasts using ipsend.TTL.

Each type of transmission, announcements, triggers, and file downloads, uses a separate IP address and port. The ipsend object provides three methods that you can use to set these values: ipsend.ConnectAnnouncement, ipsend.ConnectTrigger, and ipsend.ConnectFTS.

The following example connects an ipsend object and prepares it to transmit the enhancement stream.

'Create a new ipsend object.
Dim isend As ipsend
Set isend = New ipsend
 
'Set the Netcard and TTL values
isend.Netcard = "233.24.344.12"
isend.TTL = 64
 
'Connect to the announcement IP stream
isend.ConnectAnnouncement "122.12.133.2", 102
 
'Connect to the trigger IP stream
isend.ConnectTrigger "122.12.133.8", 108
 
'Connect to the FTS IP stream
isend.ConnectFTS "122.12.133.3", 103