P. Funk Posted September 11, 2004 Share Posted September 11, 2004 As a few of you might have noticed, the main place I do shows is my own school (that I'm now in the last year of). The one thing we have been lacking in the last few years is a show relay system to the dressing rooms - and a number of people have asked if it could be implemented for the next show (october 20th time...). While I was thinking about a simple wired system that I'd have to put in to do it, it occurred to me that the majority of the 'dressing rooms' have just had 'smartboards', and computers, and loudspeaker systems fitted in them, all connected to a 100Mbit wired LAN. So I was just wondering, does anybody know of any software or any way of broadcasting audio over a LAN that could be used for this purpose? Obviously it doesn't need to be great quality, but it does need to be instantaneous, or near enough (shoutcast is out...). It will be streaming to probably 5 or 6 rooms, and if possible, the machine connected to the audio feed will be on a wireless LAN (as there is no wired connection to that room - 802.11g/54Mbps probably). I was thinking about maybe something that would send the feed to the school server, and that could relay it to the other machines to make sure there wasn't too much data transfer going through the wireless connection (they don't like it in my experience!). Also, seeing as all the smartboards use projectors, would there be any way of streaming video as well? Maybe by just mounting a webcam on a USB extension in the LX/sound box and connecting it to the same machine doing the audio streaming. Thanks, Jon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Posted September 11, 2004 Share Posted September 11, 2004 I think this might be of help to you... video over cat5 yay my first helpful directional type post thing... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
P. Funk Posted September 11, 2004 Author Share Posted September 11, 2004 Yeah thanks for that - I thought about it but I have no idea where the cat5 extensions into the room actually go - I only know that they are all on the same network. So I doubt I could send raw data down from one end of a cable (wherever that is) to the other - I need something that will send data over TCP/IP I think :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TomLyall Posted September 11, 2004 Share Posted September 11, 2004 I think maybe you need to have a word with the people who manage the network at your school jon. Assuming you want to use their servers, or you may need to install some client software on the machines, you're going to need their permition at least if not their help too. If its only the one computer you need to show it on, how about netmeeting? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tomo Posted September 11, 2004 Share Posted September 11, 2004 Teamspeak is probably what you're looking for. It's remarkably good over the internet, so it won't bring down your school network. You will need a machine to run the server application on, and a machine running a copy of the client software anywhere where you need a sound source or sound output, so you'll have to liase with your network administrators. (Plus they'll have to open the relevant port(s) etc) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paulears Posted September 11, 2004 Share Posted September 11, 2004 This is probably a bit of a stupid suggestion, but why not just buy a cheap webcam with inbuilt sound? assuming the white boards have internet facilities, won't this work?My son and his mates all seem to be doing something like this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
P. Funk Posted September 11, 2004 Author Share Posted September 11, 2004 on all the IM applcations, you cant get webcam fullscreen, and there is also a terrible lag, and the audio quality is pretty poor, especially when broadcasting to more than one person. Teamspeak looks good - I had a bit of a play today. Some of my friends said they use it, and I'm sure we can convince our network manager to let us install it :) Also windows media encoder looked promising, but you need a machine with windows .net server 2003 on it - so unless we can get hold of a PC and a copy of it I don't think thats an option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
richard_cooper Posted September 12, 2004 Share Posted September 12, 2004 I have done a similar thing with a piece of software called VideoLan. It worked very well, however it is VERY hard to set up. You can only stream live video from a linux server, and really need a hardware MPEG encoder card. It does multicast and there are clients for most major OS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TomLyall Posted September 12, 2004 Share Posted September 12, 2004 Jon, Netmeeting might be a good option. Don't confuse this with 'other IM Clients', you should get a good video and audio quality over a LAN, especially with no-one else on it! Oh and persuading your IT people to install it should be easy, its already there for most windows versions... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
P. Funk Posted September 12, 2004 Author Share Posted September 12, 2004 Ok I might use netmeeting. Alternatively, I might try videoLAN on a linux box, or put another machine running .NET server to stream windows media encoder. Should be fun! Thanks for all your help guys. Jon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
P. Funk Posted February 21, 2005 Author Share Posted February 21, 2005 Just to give you an update.. we just finished a show using this successfully. Ran a DV cam into a PC next to the lighting desk, and unicast on windows media encoder over the network (which we ran a bit of cat5 through several windows and over several roofs to connect up to). Confiscated keyboards and mice in the 3 dressing rooms and used VNC to open up the stream in windows media player which was pre-installed on all the machines. There was a slight delay in the stream, but only about 5 seconds. Apparently 'multicasting' gets around that, but you need a seperate server so we didn't bother. We found we could get about 1.5MBytes/sec streaming to 3 machines most of the time. Thanks for all your help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
the kid Posted February 21, 2005 Share Posted February 21, 2005 What we have done before is a projector that is attached to one of those little satellite dishes (dunno what there called but there about fist size) and then on the other end a camera which is plugged to the same thing (but obviously a transmitter). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freddie Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 Video Senders they're called (if you mean what I think you mean), same frequency (2.4gHz) as: Bluetooth, wi-fi (802.11b/g), wireless CCTV, cordless phones, microwaves (no! really! only when you use them though) and about a million others. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peternewman Posted February 24, 2005 Share Posted February 24, 2005 I have done a similar thing with a piece of software called VideoLan. It worked very well, however it is VERY hard to set up. You can only stream live video from a linux server, and really need a hardware MPEG encoder card. It does multicast and there are clients for most major OS.<{POST_SNAPBACK}>Video Lan has improved quite a lot now, you can now stream from the client in most operating systems, it can also take input from a Firewire connected camera and stream that, as well as from various other sources like files, DVD's and presumably capture cards. PN Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JCoster Posted February 25, 2005 Share Posted February 25, 2005 Just to give you an update.. we just finished a show using this successfully. Ran a DV cam into a PC next to the lighting desk, and unicast on windows media encoder over the network (which we ran a bit of cat5 through several windows and over several roofs to connect up to). Confiscated keyboards and mice in the 3 dressing rooms and used VNC to open up the stream in windows media player which was pre-installed on all the machines. There was a slight delay in the stream, but only about 5 seconds. Apparently 'multicasting' gets around that, but you need a seperate server so we didn't bother. We found we could get about 1.5MBytes/sec streaming to 3 machines most of the time. Thanks for all your help.<{POST_SNAPBACK}> I wonder what genious got Media Encoder to work :huh:?! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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