The VideoLAN Forums

Hi!!

First I would like to say if anyone can help me with this I will be very happy.. I have been working on this project since Monday almost nonstop and I am VERY STRESSED OUT!!! and my boss is getting a bit impatient as well!


Okay..... Here goes.

I have an ASUS PE9400 TV tuner / capture card --- maybe VLC just does not like it ??!!

system specs: (system is DEDICATED for this project)

AMD 5200+ 2.6GHz
4GB DDR2 800
HD3450 512mb
Windows XP PRO MCE
ASUS PE9400 digital+analog tv tuner
using the cards COMPOSITE video input



WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO:

I work for a local TV station STAR NEWS aka cable18, we are trying to stream a LIVE FEED from our station in Martinsville, VA
to our sister station in Reidsville, NC .....

We have a dedicated T1 line on both ends JUST FOR THIS VIDEO STREAM !!!

THIS STREAM WILL BE BROADCAST OVER LIVE CABLE AND BROADCAST TV !!! QUALITY IS UPMOST IMPORTANCE !!!

We have about 1.3 MEGABITs of UPSTREAM BANDWIDTH to work with.. This has already been confirmed constant on both ends.


So whats the problem?



When I try to steam a signal in VLC everything is OK for the first 5 seconds and then POW all sorts of random display curruption. This occurs localy and remotely.. It does not matter what bitrate is used or what encoder.. HOWEVER their is variance:

curruption is MUCH WORSE on the MPEG4 encoder... (takes over whole picture with some sort of nasty black boxes)

When I try to stream MPEG2 is is only 3 FPS?!?! but no real curruption just looks very poor even at 1200Kb/s !!

When I tried the VMW1 and WMV2 the screen sort of "pulses" the framerate is good and the picture quality is OK but it "pulses" looks like the whole picture has a heartbeat!

H264 encoder makes VLC crash, so does MPEG1 encoder

the other encoders all have similar problems or also refuse to work..


My personal conclusion: VLC does not like somthing about my setup

I have tried a lot of different webcam software but everything I have found is CRAP! I did manage to setup a beautiful WM9 1.2Mb/s stream with a peice of software called "Webcam 1-2-3" however, that software is very limited and has some major issues of its own.

Does anyone know some webcam software or ANYTHING so I can setup this stream? What I really need is somthing that can encode to MPEG4 or similar and i need to be able to choose from the 3 inputs on my capture card (that is Webcam 123's major problem!!)

ALSO latancy is a bit of an issue.. 5 seconds or less is ideal but not necessary..



PLEASE HELP !!!! Thank you!!!

try the following setup run VLC 0.9.x for getting the raw stream from your TV tuner for example (dont try to transcode in 0.9.x it just has problems)

vlc.exe dvb-t:// :dvb-frequency=722000 :dvb-bandwidth=8 --program=4415 :duplicate{dst=std{access=udp,dst=127.0.0.1:1234}}

Then run another version of VLC version 0.8.x as the same time but this time use the following to relay the stream above and transcode it with this version.

vlc.exe udp://@:1234 :sout=#transcode{vcodec=WMV2,vb=1024,scale=1,acodec=mp3,ab=96,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=mmsh,mux=asf,dst=:8000}}

Open WMP, FILE/OPEN URL http://127.0.0.1:8000 if the image is fine then try it from another PC on the network)

Hope this helps