Wednesday 4 April 2007

International Day - Live Feed

I have been busy all morning using technology to provide a live feed of the International Day festival to another area of the school where students are changing and waiting before they go on stage.

I have my apple mac mini with quicktime broadcaster running in the hall with a DV camera plugged into the firewire port providing the feed.

Apple's quicktime broadcaster allows the images from the camera to be broadcast through the school network. One of things I find is that I have to put the IP address of where it is being streamed to, this would normally be a darwin streaming server, however it is to the laptop that I have quicktime installed on, not the IP address of the apple mac.

One of the things I keep forgetting is that you need to export a .mov with all the settings in, place the .mov file in a shared area and open at the other end(make a note of the other ends IP address) I don't have a streaming server available, so peer to peer works just as well.

At the other end is my laptop with a projector attached and 3.5mm male to two RCA male hooked in to provide sound to the projector. Now I have apple quicktime running providing the feed from the .mov file I put on the network.

Now why you might ask has he done this.
Well four-five years ago we ran a live feed using rca cable strung across the school, now I thought, why don't we use technology to do the same thing, no cable strung over the place, we have the network access available in all rooms, why not find a way to use it. I brought my mac mini and away we went.
One problem is that the video camera keeps turning off, just need to eject the tap and leave it, leave the cover open and it runs all the time or remove the tape.

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