Can I Use VLC to broadcast from a webcam?

[wubbzy]

I have some very basic questions I would like to answer before I dive into tinkering w/ VLC....

I need a low-cost way to broadcast a lecture that will travel to various places around the country. Each place will have broadband Internet available. The video quality is not terribly important -- audio quality should be good. There is potential for 10-50 people to "tune in" to each lecture from across the country.

I was thinking of putting a consumer-grade webcam + microphone (e.g., Logitech Quickcam) on a laptop and run VLC Media Player.
1) I assume VLC can broadcast to many viewers?
2) What type of media player do the viewers need to view the video stream?
3) Can access to the stream be password protected so that it's not open to the public?
4) If 100 people view the video stream, then I'm going to eat up 100 times the bandwidth, right?
5) If I'm concerned about bandwidth at the lecture site, can/should I have VLC back at our central office where there is more bandwidth, and have viewers connect there?

Thanks.

p.s. Does VLC work with WebCamDV (http://www.orangeware.com)? That lets you use a DV camcorder as a webcam.

[Aliby]

I am not sure if this is helpful, but in VLC if you select "open capture device" and click refresh then ALL the available/active capture devices are shown: TV cards, firewire cameras (liekly to be your camera), webcams etc.

If you just want to "grab" it VLC should see it without any other software.

[ph0t0n]

Whether your webcam is supported or not depends on the hardware technology (i.e. Apples old iSight (which I have) is not supported, AFAIK), what audio/video formats it encodes and what transport it choses to get the data onto the cable/network.

1 - VLC can be configured to stream over http, rtp/udp, etc., depending on choice of audio/video encoding and container formats.
2 - VLC would be the most obvious choice for a media player at the client side. Mplayer is another good choice.
3 - You can specify a password for http stream output, don't know about other transport mechanisms. Not sure about the real security value of this mechanism, as it does not encrypt the stream data.
4 - You don't specify a stream output to be 100% of your upload bandwidth. Adjust parameters until quality is acceptable, then calculate with number of potential clients and add 30% overhead for a unicast stream. If you stream in multicast, every client reads the same stream, but the network routers must support multicast, which excludes most ISP routers. VLC can do transcoding (format recoding), which can be processor intensive, but save upload bandwidth if you must broadcast over unicast.
5) You can always set up another VLC instance (at the target network) to act as a relay, so the clients are connecting to that one instead of your instance. That way, a unicast session from instance A to instance B could be unicast, and the stream from B to the clients be multicast.

If I remember correctly, VLC can read from DV-cams, if you can connect it to your system and have it discover/talk to your camera.