iBook Video Streaming

[Charles Pearce]

I can't remember who posted the question a couple of weeks ago 
concerning streaming video using an iBook. At the time, I was also 
interested in doing just that and anticipated eagerly the response. The 
response, however, was largely negative--it would take at least a G4, 
much RAM and so on. Yesterday I did it. With an iBook.

Apple has a free app called Quicktime Broadcaster that has about six or 
8 codecs built in to stream both audio and video. Their own readme says 
that a G4 is preferred, but any PowerPC would work. I loaded the 
software on my iBook and with a wireless connection (Airport, not even 
Extreme) fed the stream to a server (within our building) on which is 
running QuickTime Streaming Server (also free). The machine happens to 
be a Linux box that doesn't have much load right now. So far so good.

Next, I took the iBook home and connected the camera to it and fed the 
stream through my home wireless to cable modem to the Quicktime 
Streaming Server. The results weren't as good as at work, but still the 
video showed. Initially, the audio stuttered (a lot), but I cranked it 
down to 8,000 KHz mono and it worked. I later found out that if I had 
clocked the video down to 15fps instead of 30fps, then I could have 
cranked the audio quality up with little noticeable degradation of the 
video.

In short, and to answer the questioner of a few weeks ago: Yes, it can 
be done--and with an iBook. Quite simply and quite elegantly (the 
Macintosh way).

By the way, if you want to see the results (not streaming from an 
iBook, but my office G4 on a T3 connection), here's the URL: 
<rtsp://cheetah.jmc.ksu.edu/techtv.sdp>. If you connect, you will be 
watching TechTV with the camera looking at the TV screen. The audio is 
from the built-in mic. This stream uses the Sorenson codec and Qualcom 
audio because I wanted it to be able to be seen with QuickTime 5 
Player. The cpu usage is a lot less with the default MPEG-4 codec, not 
to mention that the video and the audio are better. This is just an 
experiment because I have plans in a couple of weeks for a broadcast of 
a live event and wanted to see how to do it. This experiment will 
probably be turned off in a couple of hours.


Dr. Charles Pearce, Associate Director,
A. Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications
and Advertising Sequence Head
105 Kedzie Hall
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506-1501
785-532-3964 or FAX: 785-532-5484
http://faculty.jmc.ksu.edu/pearce
charlesp at ksu.edu