Chris,
Thanks for the suggestion. I've looked hard at Helix and Darwin Streaming Server, but am hesitant to bite just yet. I like StreamStudio, but it appears to be a dead project, and I may have to default back to Darwin or Helix.
My main concern lies in that so many of the streaming solutions assume you are doing a true capture thru a capture card, or file serving a feed. I'm trying to do something different in that I'm focusing on a live feed, with as little lag as possible. The live connection puts in a set of issues that I just don't see addressed that often.
From my reading, I'm hoping to use a camcorder with a Firewire (IEEE 1394) connection to do the heavy encoding lifting. One of my real questions is how much processor load will I realize by converting from the DV combined audio/video format to something like quicktime, thedora, real, whatever. Will having a capture card with embedded decode on it help? If so, how much? I am hoping that the CPU hit will be less for a conversion than a true encoding, but it's hard to say. The reason I want to lean so much on the dv/1394 solution is that it's a lot easier to find camcorders to borrow than dig up four capable encode/decode capture cards.
But those two links I've already bookmarked after browsing thru and will read them in much better detail. I have no doubt the forums will provide me a wealth of information, and I can't thank you enough for the leads. It seems almost anymore that even as good as the search engines are, a lot of the deep forums aren't indexed anymore. Whether or not it's from neglect by the search engines, or that the forum owners don't want the deep linking I don't know.
At the end of the day I'd love to use a more well known, possibly stabler solution than an unknown one (StreamStudio), and Darwin Streaming Server has a lot of attention and admiration.
I appreciate the information, and the links, and wish you the best of luck.
Have a great weekend,
Dave
Chris Bier wrote:
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Dave, You might want to take a look at jclinton's page on H.264 (MPEG4 Part 10) and AAC (MPEG4 Part 3). They will give you a high quality, low bandwidth, well supported on major OSs audio-video format. http://jasonclinton.com/video_journal_howto.xhtml I'm working on setting up and running the Darwin Streaming Server. Which supports several different formats and looks to be easier to deal with than Helix. http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/streaming/ https://www.helixcommunity.org/
Chris