[RP TownTalk] Video and Audio Streaming

[Rob Oppenheim]

On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 07:23:08 -0500 (GMT-05:00), bruce.wernek at mindspring.com wrote:
>...I would like to ask who is going to design, test, implement, and maintain Council meeting streaming video and audio content?  This will be a significant effort.  Are there any volunteers out there?

I plan on working on this and will be "volunteering" time for it. Indeed I have been looking into it for awhile now, and have experimented with creating digital video. (Improving communications is one of my campaign promises).

I believe that streaming is not all that expensive or difficult. There are a lot of kids with web cams out there, and they are not spending thousands of dollars per month on it, although in some cases they are getting free hi speed Internet access thru their school. The only significant ongoing expense is the bandwidth. 

What will be needed is an appropriate PC. One with a TV tuner, a good size hard disk, fast Internet connection, at least 512MB ram (preferable more) which is located in a place accessible to volunteers. It also needs a fast processor (ideally hyperthreaded to keep up with both the analog to digital conversion and the simultaneous transmission to the Internet). This does not need to be a super computer. My 2 GHz Celeron can digitize video using xvid in near real time. I would think that a 2.5 Ghz or faster hyperthreaded CPU would do the job. Although it is better to buy more than what is needed.

This PC could also be used by others. It does not need to be dedicated to this job. I think it could be located in the front office and used by staff during the day.

The video does not need to be high quality video. 15 frames/second might be a little jerky for action videos, but should be fine for "talking heads".  300 kbit/sec or less will create fine video for this purpose - especially if using an advance CODEC (e.g. xvid).. That is about 130 megabytes per hour. So a 2.5 hour meeting would be about a 1/3 of a gig. If we use UDP broadcasting than that is all the bandwidth we need. However, we will probably have to use TCP which means each user needs that much bandwidth. I doubt if we would have very many users. If we had 35 that would be just 8 gigs/month. My web site provider - http://trkhosting.com (who I really like) would provide 15GB per month for just $13/month. However, if we stream it ourselves from our own server, then it is just Comcast bandwidth. (I do not know what contract the town has with Comcast for Internet service.)


I have to run now. More later.
Rob
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://riverdale-park.org/pipermail/towntalk/attachments/20060119/5699a05f/attachment-0003.html>