[PLUG-AV] Streaming Tests

[Tim]

Ok, so the local shop didn't have the DV cable they ordered in for me.
I now wonder why I didn't look on ebay first, should have one by the
end of the week for $3.50 from Oz!

Playing with icecast server tonight. Streaming from webcam (640x480 is
default capture resolution) via vlc to icecast. ADSL1 connection
1500/256. Streaming machine is a AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+
(1.8Ghz) with 3Gb ram running Ubuntu Natty 64bit.

Initial attempts to stream failed as I was trying H264. Moved on to
Theora without audio at 640x480. My machine was unable to get a good
stream, dropping frames due to encoding at 100% cpu. It was jittery.
Currently, while writing this email in Gmail (Prism) with very little
else open, I'm streaming at 160x128 (scale 0.25) using a meager 10-20
CPU with drops down to 4% (for VLC). Nethogs reports a upstream of
10-20KB/s, although it hovers closer to 10 and drops as low as 4 when
very little changes. Interesting enough, I can see the downstream
traffic is close to being insync with the upstream, even though the
downstream appears delayed by 10seconds. (Playback is on computer that
uses this one as gateway). Theora bitrate is set to 200kb/s

Upping the scaling to 0.5, gives us a stream of 320x240, rest of the
settings remain the same.
VLC CPU is now hovering around 38%, although it seems to drop when i
move around, not increase. Odd.
Outgoing traffic is 19-22KB/s which I think is reaching the limits of
my connection. Watching myself is still smooth enough, so I don't
think it's maxed out yet.
Delay is down to 4 seconds, so not sure if it's related to when I
connected to the stream, as I managed to connect almost as soon as I
started streaming, while previously it took some time.

Anyway. That's all for tonight. It's good to see the icecast server is
so easy to connect to and use. Did it take much to get setup? I kinda
expected it would have been the hard part in the setup.

What software are we thinking of encoding and streaming with? And I
assume the camera's are going to be DV in?

Hope that helps. I'll look at using a core2duo next.

Tim
-- 
Timothy White - Somewhere in Australia