Webcam streaming - recommended settings?

[sekatsim]

I've been trying for the last day or so to get VLC to stream a webcam feed from one computer to another. (v1.0.5 windows -> v 1.0.5 osx snow leopard) I keep running into problems:

Audio worked yesterday. Now, when I try to stream audio, I get:

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VLC Cannot use the device "Microphone (USB audio device:dshow-caching=200" because its type is not supported

It seems to me like VLC is getting confused about the name of the audio device.. but I can't find anywhere to override the name (or to disable caching).

Also, what are recommended settings for webcam streaming? I figured a resolution of 640x480 would work fine.. but I'm having a hard time getting any consistent results with the video. I got it streaming over MMS, once. It would never work again, even with the same settings. Right now I'm focusing mostly on HTTP streaming-- but sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I get an "unable to open the transcoder" error. When I try to stream again, I don't get the error. About 50% of the time, VLC on the client computer just stalls and never shows a video. Other times, it works fine. I was never able to get UDP to work.

Any thoughts? More than anything, I'm finding the inconsistency aggravating. I can repeat the Exact same steps twice and it seems like a coin-toss as to whether it will work or not.