Greetings all,

I've helping to put together a conference next year at the Airport Marriott and would like to live stream some of the breakout sessions over the net. I can find all sorts of file served broadcast solutions, but finding a live solution is something else, especially coupled with the firewire and miniDV format.

Hardware I envision is 4 camcorders, for the video signal, running into 4 linux boxes. The linux box's primary purpose would be to convert the DV format to something streamable (Thedora, quicktime, Real, something) and send it to a central (on site) server. This central server would then send the converted signal to a paid for remote server that would actually serve the signals to the audience. It would also serve at least one other box that would serve as registration, and possibly one more if we wanted to handle live questions (via email) from the internet audience.

As some of the sessions will be panel discussions, I'll be running them thru a mixer, then running into the linux box, but that shouldn't be that big of a deal.

With the camcorders doing the heavy lifting of encoding, I wouldn't think I'd need much in the way of processing power, but that's one of the things I need to figure out. Especially CPU load in converting from DV to something else.

Although the Marriott only has a single T1 line, I think I can get an acceptable signal to the audience.

Your thoughts on possible solutions and potential pitfalls would be appreciated.

Dave