anyone with experience of live video streaming?

[cheese]

Hi,

I don’t even know where to post this but I’m hoping someone might have be able to point me in the right direction.

A friend of mine wants to broadcast his wedding live as a lot of the family aren’t able to make it to the wedding, he has asked me to set it up for him. He is getting married in quite a rural place (uk) so most probably the only internet connection I am going to be able to use is a 3g dongle, I’d guess 3-4Mb connection.

So for best quality I’m guessing I’ll use a dv camera connected directly into my macbook pro with firewire but after that I don’t know what I should be aiming for. Should I run some sort of media server on my laptop and email out an ip address, should I set up a domain and redirect or would anyone know of a good online service that would accommodate this? I read a few sites where people used an ftp connection to upload directly to their domain but I am not sure if that would be quick enough. Maybe implementing some sort of buffer might work if it were to be done that way.

I assume the macbook pro will have to encode on the fly, is flash the best format?

Would the 3g dongle have enough bandwidth?

Worst case scenario would be that the video is taped at the church, encrypted on the way to the hotel and streamed using their wifi but he would really like it to be done live.

Thanks in advance.

[michaeloneill]

I agree with Speed Gum. I had to broadcast a display stand from Singapore to family and friends back home in Ireland. I used Ustream and it worked great!

[cheese]

I have just had a look at ustream and stickam, the only problem is that they throw in a 30 second advertisement every now and again.

Michael, I don’t suppose you know how much bandwith you were using? I need to try and work out if a 3g dongle is going to do the business.

[michaeloneill]

@cheese The bandwidth wouldnt have been good. There was over 30 computers using the wireless at once. I remember it be it being reasonably slow…

[kenacer]

Make sure you have enough uplink speed. I am using live streaming service from zogoxstreaming.com , They have very good price and supports multiplatform streaming such as iphone,flash. I can stream 600kbps without any problem.

[gno]

I’m not much into live video streaming – but – I’d say that you should aim for a solution where you stream to your viewers via a server somewhere so you’re not running into uplink bandwidth issues.

If you have a 3g dongle you’ll have like 500 kbps at best – and thats not enough for more than like 1 or 2 viewers. If you send it to a server which distributes it to others, you’ll not have the same problems, as the viewers do not have to connect directly to your macbook.

Just my 2 cents…

[Author]

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