[PD] could OSC support tcp?

[Andy Schmeder]

<quote who="eskogen at usfamily.net">
> will OSC ever support tcp? let's say i wanted to send data to my friend
> so-and-so across the internet to such-and-such place. i'd like it to be
> OSC and i'd like to use Pd. is there a way to do this? seems like if we
> can have udp, we should be able to have tcp with a minumum of effort,

OSC is itself a protocol which is completely independent of the choice of
transport method.  UDP is most common because it gives the lowest latency
for local area networks.  Using TCP, or even Jabber, IRC, http, email or
shortwave radio is up to the implementor. :)

Another way to get UDP over TCP is via tunneling, e.g. VPN.

> however, i had another related question. how can one assure consistant
real-time performance beyond net-lag? are timetag messages reliable for
this? i'm just getting interested in OSC so any help would be welcome.

Yes.  That is exactly the the purpose of the timetag.  If a message is
recieved with a timetag which is expired, it gets dropped.  Timetags
marked in the future are to be queued and held until the specified time. 
This will enable jitter correction with a hard latency threshold.  Note
that OSC is intended to be a completely stateless protocol, so dropping
packets if latency bounds are not met is considered the right thing to do.

However, I have not yet seen any implementation of OSC that actually uses
the timetag feature.  Once again, it would not be hard, its just that no
one has seen the need to do it... yet.



Andy.

---
Andrew W. Schmeder
andy_at_a2hd_dot_com
http://www.a2hd.com