[BC] Re: Radio stations who also stream video

[Goran Tomas]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Alan Peterson
<alanpeterson at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Are you tied to a dedicated rackmount hardware device, or are some of you doing it with a common video capture card on a plain vanilla PC? REALLY interested in knowing here.

I did just simple video streaming (apart from the jingle and scrolling
text in Real, nothing fancy) on a radio station I worked for. It seems
to still be working, although someone knocked the camera a little bit.
Go to http://radiostudent.redirectme.net/ scroll down and click on the
Windows Video stream (it seems the Real server is down, so Real
streams don't work).

The camera is a little Sony color surveillance camera, going to a
capture card (this is tricky part because various software will not
want to work with various video capture cards) which sits in the
encoding PC. It's a customized rack-mount PC that I did myself. Runs
dual Xeons a couple of years old, which encode Windows Media audio and
video streams, Real Media audio and video streams and 15 Orban
Opticodec encoders with various bitrates and formats (web streaming
and streaming to mobile phones). Out of the bunch, Windows Media is by
far the worst encoding software - uses a lot more CPU than the others
and is prone to closing unexpectedly. Additionally, both Real and
Opticodec can ba batched, which makes them much more useful for
automated and unattended control.

These days I would just go with Flash using H.264 for video and AAC
for audio... You can design your own player to put on a web site.
Flash Live Encoder is available for free, but you have to pay for AAC
encoding.

Regards,
Goran Tomas