[P1] Live webcasts on an iBook

[Joe Jones]

Transmitting the signal via Airport (or even wired ethernet) would be 
tricky. An uncompressed DV stream would have too high a data rate to be 
able to sent over either of those systems (although ethernet might be 
theoretically fast enough, it's unlikely in practice).

Your iBook doesn't have anywhere near enough CPU power to encode on the 
fly, so you'd have to offload this task to another machine - a G4 tower 
with a lot of RAM perhaps, but then you run into the problem of getting 
the signal from the iBook back to the tower when the the iBook is 
remote.

DV just wasn't designed for this sort of thing. TV stations get around 
this problem by having dedicated encoding hardware (and this stuff is 
expensive) before the satellite/cable transmission, and even then you 
get a 2 second delay due to the time it takes to encode the signal into 
mpeg2/ac3. The UK uses mpeg2 as the digital TV standard since it makes 
it easy to make the set top boxes - you can just use DACs from DVD 
players, and they've been refined and worked with for a while now.

On Friday, Jun 6, 2003, at 11:41 America/Chicago, Peter Nacken wrote:

> Does anyone here of the knowing people have any experience with live
> webcasts ??
>
> I ran into this nice software on channelstorm.com and I am getting very
> intrigued.
>
> One idea I wonder if feasible is hooking up a DV cam to the ibook an 
> run
> around with it (cam and iBook) and transmitting the signal via airport 
> (too
> slow ? )  .. But I figure I cannot close the iBook for that .. Makes 
> running
> around tricky ..
>
> Well .. If anyone here is a specialist on that .. Maybe we can get in 
> touch
> off list ..
>
> Thanks a great weekend everyone
>
> P in Fiji
>
>
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