Today I met up with my friend Klaus Rødahl, film producer and half of Film Non Grata. Besides talking about the weather, I was planning to pump him for information on video recording, mixing and streaming.
Klaus showed me a promising piece of free software from Apple called Quicktime Broadcaster. It may be just what I need for my low-budget webcasting ambitions, provided I find myself a MacBook or something similar.
Quicktime Broadcaster (QB) captures video directly through the FireWire port of the computer. That means I don’t need an expensive video card, and that any DV camera will do the job (they all have FireWire output, I’m told).
I can also plug the analog line out from the mixing desk right into the computer’s soundcard, and QB will mix it together with the video. I like!
Text overlays may be possible through some use of AppleScript, but I’m not 100% sure on this one. It’s definitely a must, though.
QB sends out a single stream, which means that an additional streaming server is need to serve more that one viewer. That, and a big, fat broadband connection. Now there’s a challenge for the independent webcaster.
Apple products work with Apple-compatible formats, naturally, so QB uses the H.264 MPEG-4 codec, as well as the 3GPP streaming format for mobile multimedia. I’m not sure this is what I want, so I’m thinking to set up transcoding of the stream on another computer running VideoLAN (also free software, this time cross-plattform). I guess it takes a beefed-up computer to achieve this in real-time.
With your iPhone, you can soon watch iConcerts of your favorite iArtists, live from our mysterious jazz cafe in Oslo.
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