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| Joined: | Mar 3rd, 2008 |
| Location: | Muskogee, Oklahoma USA |
| Posts: | 349 |
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The streaming is, I believe, still the same as when we used to run our cams in Minnesota in 2007/8. You can get a good feel for how the whole thing works by going to ustream.tv and just channel hopping around like using a TV. One way of thinking of it is like YouTube...if you've ever uploaded a video to there, then it's like constantly uploading one, with the video able to be seen as you do so.
The basis, is that you 'Sign Up' for a free account. Create the profile of your 'Show' and then connect with their server. It's all an easy few stage stepped through process.
All you need, is a webcam.
You get to see your video stream live and have the option to view as webwatchers will be doing. You can then set frame rate, quality, sound on/off/volume level and other details if wished.
There's a processing delay of a couple of seconds in the live stream (maybe they have an automatic program to spot misuse), but is still considered as live as it can be.
Streams can run for however long you wish..our cams were up 24/7, which is why we had a dedicated PC just for the streaming.
To try it out, just create any profile you want when you've registered. If it looks to be what you want and works comfortably, then you can edit your profile to be a live feed others can watch.
Some more info, though specific to our cams we had.
You can actually set up a second channel or probably more. We used to also run Cougar Cams2, because our home system needed more cams (odd events in the garage meant a cam needed going in there). Our system was an ex CCTV 4 camera unit. The cameras plugged into the CCTV unit, then the output of the 4 images was sent to a TV capture card on the PC. Each camera would be shown for 10 seconds and they rotated like that for the live stream.
Our only trouble was hard drives...being as the system was running all the time, we used to find that hard drives would go about every 4 months. Perhaps Keith had similar problems, plus being on all the time it runs electrical risks if you go on vacation or whatever.
We had live games too on there. A 'Spin the Wheel' game where web users could stop a wheel from spinning and try to get the pointer to line up with a mark on the outside of it..that was incredibly popular, seeing thousands of spins and attempts. That was just a de-cased CD-rom drive mounted vertically with a CD on it and Sharpie'd arrows. Also a 'Guess the number' LED game, where someone with possible precognitive abilities might guess the number of random LED's that would be shown when they clicked to run the game (all games ran from the parallel port of the PC and I created webpages to allow the interactions).
Our cams were:
1 - Two mirrors facing each other, one from a haunted house, cam was between them
2 - Television ITC feedback loop
3 - Interactive games
4 - Basement overview (all were in the basement as that's where historically the activity was)
Anyway, so it can be as easy as setting up a single cam, or can branch out and involve experiments, games, multiple cams and more
Last edited on Oct 19th, 2010 08:07 AM by Slider2732