Tips for live streaming setup?

[Guest]

Hello.

I'm planning to live-stream a little event at our university, so VideoLAN seems to be a nice solution. At the moment, my plans for a setup are

- 3 Video-Sources (analog), captured and encoded (to MP4 or Ogg) by 2 or 3 Computers (running VLC), conneted to LAN
- 1 Streaming Server, running VLC on Linux, connected to the streams offered over LAN and offering the streams to the Internet.
- Each stream should be about 500kb/s to be viewable over DSL (Germany)
- a maximum of 100 Viewers

Testing the setup, I came across some questions and requirements I cound't figure out / I'm not shure about:

- HTTP streaming should be most reliable to avoid firewall and NAT-touble, right? Bandwich is no problem
- How does CPU/IO scale when a lot of clients connect to a HTTP-Stream? Or, in other words, will a 1,8 Ghz Athlon/512 Ram do as server for 100 Viewers?
- MP4 or Ogg/Theora? MP4: Do I have to pay for licencing if the stream is "non-commercial"? Ogg: Is there "standard" windows/OS-X software to watch an OGG-Stream?
- Are there "statistics" showing how many users are watching a stream currently? Using netstat of course works, but, let's say, could be nicer.

The hole thing only has to work for one night

Thanks in advance for your help

[josejunior01]

Have you been able to find out if you can support 100 viewers with the current conifguration?

[mediaguy06]

I hope you have some serious bandwidth.. if you are going to stream at 500 KB remember that every stream will take up KB so if you have 100 people thats 50,Meg's of pure band with you will need a DS3 so all the people can see your stream unless you have a ds3 at your disposal.. so you may need to put it at a data center to be able to have people connected to your live stream. It is not live then and its on demand you may still have a bottle neck. I have don't know what your application is or whether you are trying to stream a TV format so you may want to conceder making your stream smaller so you can fit more people. If you are looking for a reliable solution there maybe other optional available. The considerations of what your budget and whether you are trying to have a feed that is broadcast quality if that is not what you'r are looking for and it just to have game or event to see that you don't need it to look that pretty then there are a couple of streaming software vendors available that can do the job. I hope that helps a little..