Live Stream Sporting Events and Studio Productions???

[ECUmedford]

NEWBIE ALERT! NEWBIE ALERT! Please be patient with me!

I just stumbled across this website and think I may have found my solution, but I am hoping that someone can give me some advice.

I represent a university who is curious about streaming live video of sporting events and studio productions. We want to be able to create our own medium without having to rely on TV networks to pick up our football, basketball, and baseball games. I am at a loss as to how we can do this. Here is what I WANT to be able to do.

I want to be able to hook 3-4 cameras to a single computer (How can I do this). Rather than having a traditional switchboard, I would like to have a switchboard software program (CAN'T FIND ONE ANYWHERE) that allows me to view each camera, and be able to choose which camera to take live. Does that kind of software exist? Plus I want to be able to stream this live.

And get this....I want to be able to do all of this CHEAP! : )

Can I use VideoLan to Stream this video? Should I setup my own server? What would that cost? Would we have to pay horendous bandwidth bills?

Is this stuff even possible?

I really appreciate any direction anyone can provide me.

Regards,
Jonathan

[The DJ]

Sounds like a great idea, but i don't think anyone has done this so far with VLC.

[HaaRviK]

First off....good luck...you're gonna need it. Second, I have 9 streams multicasting from my network, but they are all windows machines. Linux just doesn't work (imagine, a linux program that works better on a windows pc). The only way to do what you are after is to use TV cards to capture the input from the camera's, unless you use a usb or firewire webcam. That being said, you can't have two of the same card in a windows box...i.e. 2 Hauppauge cards. Secondly, to be able to stream from the cards, you have to have the native screen viewer open in order to pass the video to vlc. If you can't see video in the native app, you won't see it in vlc.

Tom

[Gibalou]

Secondly, to be able to stream from the cards, you have to have the native screen viewer open in order to pass the video to vlc. If you can't see video in the native app, you won't see it in vlc.
Tom

Hmmm, I'm curious about this. What card do you use ? Is it one of those cards which uses "DirectX Video Ports (VP)" ?

[HaaRviK]

I am using the Hauppauge PVR-250 with the CX23416 chip.

[omi]

Hello, I have video capture and streaming working just fine on linux 2.6.4 (I had some problems with 2.6.6 and 2.6.7 thus went back to what was working). You can connect as many video capture cards as you have PCI slots. In my box I can have 3 some have 5 or 6.

One thing to watch out for is that you might not have enough /dev/video* devices
if you have 5 capture cads (doesn't matter which, as long as they are supported) and you only have video entries until video2 you need to create video3, video5 entries by running

mknod /dev/video3 c 81 3
mknod /dev/video4 c 81 4

and set proper ownership (chown /dev/video* user)


I have videostreaming happening to ASF (WMP 9 picks it up fine) and MPEG4.

Regarding selecting which card to stream from, you may need to write a script which acceps input in terms of a number of the video input 0 for video0, 1 for video1 and so on.. and recreates symlink /dev/video to one of the video{number} devices.

when this script is ran:
1. pauses VLC
kill -cont $VLC_PID (you need to initialize this variable)
2. Removes /dev/video
rm /dev/video
3.Creates a new symlink
ln -s /dev/video$1 /dev/video
4. Resumes VLC again.
Don't remember how it is done from top of my head (basicly script version of doing Control+Z on keyboard)


In theory this should work since /dev/video just sends a stream, you can pause at any time and continue at any time, so I don't think VLC should complain while it is paused.


Another possible approach would be to use DevFS over network with encoder and workstation.

Best regards,

Oleg Mitsura