Video and Audio Streaming into Second Life
by admin on Jan.20, 2008, under Second Life
One difficult item that has bugged me for quite a bit has been trying to stream media from Windows PC’s into SL.
Winamp to Shoutcast.com via the DSP Plugin is one solutions but suffers from a very bad buffer delay that places you out of synch with what people are hearing. Imaging up to a 90 second delay in a conversation and thats about what you get..
If you have a Macintosh available to you then there is no problem as all the tools are there and ready to roll (Broadcaster is free and there are other FREE tools for Mac but not the PC)
Well I have found one pretty nice (but expensive $500) solution in Vara Software’s Wirecast. If you don’t mind the annoying audio over or the video watermark you can use it for free all you like. The learning curve is very low and the tool is easy to use.
Here is a link for FAQ on MPEG Streaming.
I managed to get Apple Computers Windows version of media streaming server up and running (called Darwin Streaming Server) but it was a bear to get all the correct open ports. I wanted to be able to stream to it from work so I even re-routed many of the ports but to no avail in the end. Darwin was nice but it took a couple tries installing it to get it operational so if you plan on trying it have at least a day or two to spend getting your head wrapped around all the concepts and hurdles (ports and testing etc..)
I can tell for work my best bet will be to put together a cheap windows machine with perhaps an Osprey media encoder card to get the best in streaming performance into the broadcaster and hence into SL. It’s better to have the system doing the encoding close to the broadcaster system to reduce audio dropouts etc. I’ve never check out any of the live streaming service provider that are around but I think it best to be sure that you have a good pipe from where every you do it especially if you intend to broadcast video and audio at the same time.
One other product of interest is a nice Windows Video Mixer from LividInstruments. I think you could probably use this product and pipe the output back through a Osprey card then directly to QTSS (Darwin or QT Broadcaster) for a very nice looking presentation.
I had a chance to look through icecast live streaming capabilities. It’s works with Winamp/Shoutcast DSP Plug-In and I for one liked it a lot better than running and configuring the Shoutcast Server. I guess once you begin to understand the basic concepts behind the port(s) configuration and stuff it makes it much easier.
Icecast had less of a delay 10-15 seconds than Shoutcast (90 seconds - due to in part a big buffer in Shoutcast server)
Icecast is easier to configure and works the pretty much the same way that you would see when working with Shoutcast server the only trick is to remember that you have to configure two ports in Icecast. The ports would be something like 8080 and 8081 (pick your own sequential ports for this) and you would (per the help docs) configure the second port to be shoutcast compatible.
So my final picks on a Mac would be QT Broadcaster with QTSS and on a Windows box I like Vara’s Wirecast for low delay broadcasting with Darwin (on Windows) Streaming Server.
If you for sure do not want the Video or you want to support a broad audience (audio only) then perhaps Icecast and typical corporate firewall open ports of 80 or 8080 for listening (most of the tools support opening multiple listening port cconfigurations.) I dont think most corporate firewalls open two sequential ports for streaming though so getting Shoutcast DSP Plugin side by side ports is probably not going to work but check with your own IT team.
Hope this helps
