75ZT Community

Anyone know anything about live audio/video streaming?

A friend of mine has a website and wants to stream live audio/video to it.

Is there much involved?

Dunno. I wanted to d/load some Video streams but couldn't even manage that. Maybe I need some software huh..

But Uploading is much much slower than down loading on my PC. e.g. up 350 down 6000.. So your mate may need a lot of power..
...

Depends what you mean when you say "stream video to it"? I would be possibly assuming that you want a scenario in which you visit a website and then from that website you can watch a live video feed from a remote location? Very similar idea to some of the bird-box cameras that have video feeds on the internet?

SpongeBob wrote:Depends what you mean when you say "stream video to it"? I would be possibly assuming that you want a scenario in which you visit a website and then from that website you can watch a live video feed from a remote location? Very similar idea to some of the bird-box cameras that have video feeds on the internet?

That pretty much describes it, SB.

He runs an audio visual company and is being requested on a regular basis to stream a show live to the interweb. Any idea whats needed?

Well, what he would need is a way to capture the video live from the cameras onto a computer. This would then need to be compressed enough to allow it to be uploaded to the internet. The quality may be fairly low but what your after is a smooth consistent frame rate rather than all-out pixel quality. Uploading to the internet would probably be a case of using something akin to webcams whereby the software is able to broadcast the video via (most probably) a specific IP address. The website would then have to be coded to 'listen' to that IP address to 'collect' the video stream and then publish the stream to the end-user.

Software such as Adobe's Flash has quite a few video streaming options whereby the video delivered to the end-user is tailored to the users bandwidth (e.g. a user on a fast connection can get better quality video than a user on a slower connection but both users get a smoothly delivered video without any dropped frames or pauses etc). I'm not sure how Flash handles listening to IP addresses to pick up live data streams and it's been a while since I've looked into using it to deliver video but the capabilities are there. You may find that there are companies out there who offer this sort of service such as you providing the video and they then offer the end-user the interface via their website to access and view the live stream.

It's not at all an easy process and certainly isn't for the feint-hearted in web development but it is doable. I'm sure there are other options/ideas so do ask around. Good luck!

I don't know as I haven't actually played with one yet, but I believe most IP cameras have a web based application. Certainly some NAS boxes like the synology have the software to support plugging in an IP camera and receiving the video stream, and then making it available through a web front end.

Haven't done it yet, but ordered the camera yesterday!

Do keep us updated Duncan.