[PLUG-AV] Streaming Tests

[James Bromberger]

On 5/04/2011 9:10 PM, Tim wrote:
> 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!

Everything retail here (in Aus) is so expensive....

> Initial attempts to stream failed as I was trying H264. 
h264 being maddening burdening to decode, let alone encode!

> 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

Nice. I have no understanding of what CPU power we'll require for doing
a larger screen res encode - but, it may be feasible for the system that
does that encoding to be on the same LAN, but perhaps at the back of the
room (or in a cupboard) where it can be as noisy as it wants!


> 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.

Do you have your command line params you used? Can you post them? Jason,
can you post yours?
>
> 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.

apt-get install icecast

Nothing to it.


>
> What software are we thinking of encoding and streaming with? 
Well, I think either Theora or VP8. Something open source.

> And I
> assume the camera's are going to be DV in?
Yep; at the moment we have one DV cam from Nick, and one from me, but
since they are expensive, they are borrowed when we're around. We need
to find an affordable DV cam we can buy at some stage. But that raises
some questions at that time: widescreen, 16:9m 4:3, SD, HD. I suspect SD
4:3.
> Hope that helps. I'll look at using a core2duo next.


My playing tonight on the donated box I installed got me setting up
mumble. Seems its only a GUI client - no command line client. Oh well.


  James

-- 
Mobile: +61 422 166 708, Email: james_AT_rcpt.to