[757labs] HR Geeks II (Oct 21st)

[telmnstr at 757.org]

> We'll be testing out the new A/V setup Ethan has been working on that will
> allow us to record (and stream?) presentations as well as pipe video around
> the lab. All in all pretty spiffy.

More equipment is on the way, pending bid sniping. So it's kind of an 
interm setup until the goodies arrive. Once these arrive we will have 3 
angles of pan/tilt/zoom/focus goodness, with presets for positions and 
stuff. I found a brand of camera that doesn't get the love that the Sonys 
get, but seems to be made of the same parts. Only downside is each camera 
uses a serial port, but the AMX has 3. Heck, probably could just put the 
things on the network.

I'm also trying to get at least one dual channel time base corrector. It's 
a gadget that has enough RAM to store a frame of video. It takes a video 
feed in for timing (I think), and then syncronizes the other video in/out 
feeds so they are exactly in time with the primary.

The encoder card barfs when you switch the video feeds and the timing 
isn't right. It just throws an error to the console and the audio goes 
silent for a fraction of a second. This box will do the magic to fix it, 
and sometimes the boxes can be had for $20 shipped. Someone suggested that 
the capture card (Chris Smith's WinTV PVR-150 w/ hardware MPEG2 
compression) was lame and should handle the out of sync video feeds, but 
my research shows that no one really feeds out of sync video to switchers 
and expects the output to ever work.

As far as internet streaming, the computer that is currently recording 
video is an AMD XP-3000 or something. 3000+? It's 1.8GHz. It doesn't have 
the CPU power to encode using VLC to stream to justin.tv. I think part of 
this might be that the captures are mpeg2-ts (transport stream, which is 
video and stereo audio.) I got the video capture card to shift to 320x200, 
which I was hoping would make it easier on the encoding. But it still 
wasn't happy. If there is a big event, we can take video from the switcher 
and feed it to a camcorder (analog in), then hook firewire to a borrowed 
laptop I can get, then feed that to the internets. For now though, I think 
recording in DVD resolution is good? We can transcode and post it to 
youtube/vimeo/etc easily from there.

Really, a core2duo is probably needed to do live streaming to sites like 
justin.tv. It's mpeg4/h264 and it's mathematically intense. There are 
coprocessor dongles like the Elgato Turbo.264, but I don't know if they 
have much support out of things like iTunes.

Someone had asked why I go Justin.tv over uStream. uStream has more 
advertisements, and they really cover up the video. Ustream pushes their 
Adobe flash based tools. Justin.TV has the VLC streaming app, and some 
other outside utilities. To go paid with ustream is pretty expensive, and 
costs per viewer hour.

I don't have a real preference, the easier the tools are to 
automate/script the more win, and the less advertisements covering up the 
video the more win.