Streaming in Mac OS X

[brains206]

I was aked to put together an art piece to stream video in 2 directions between 2 venues, one in Penzance, one in Sheffield. Here is how I did it;

The project was this, a camera on the roof, and a camera in a bowl. Use chroma-keying to mix the image of people looking into the bowl, with the sky from the camera on the roof. Transmit this over the net to the other venue for projection on the ceiling, and vice-versa.

So - we have a Quicktime streaming server, and apple's broadcaster. Software sorted - or so I thought. Install ADSL at both venues. Connection sorted. Now we need to get an analogue source into mac os x - hmmm.... okay so using firewire would work if we had a Formac solution (£300). However our budget didn't stretch to that (bloody arts sector!) so I hunted down the Interview USB device, now handled by EchoFX as interview went bust. They supplied me with 2 units which worked fine with broadcaster, using mac os x on a G3 350mhz to stream in MPEG-4. The quality was dire. So I used h263 instead, much better.

So great, he had a steam running into Registered Quicktime at full screen. Used mirros on the floor and a hung projector to get on the ceiling. So when people looked into the bowl in one location, they appear looking like an angel in the other location.

Then the artist turns to me and says; we need sound transmitting too. Ok. So thanks to apple not having included input device enabler in mac os x for a computer with a sound input, I found some software called SoundOut on version tracker. This enabled the sound ports on my G3 Laptop, but didn't work on the Biege G3 transmitting the sound. So I bought an iMic, this was picked up by broadcaster so we could broadcast sound and video- or so I thought. This is where things started to go wrong. The video wouldn't start broadcasting after hitting the broadcast button. I tried everything, reinstalling the OS, the drivers everything. Broadcaster would not pick up the video anymore.

So - with only hours left in location one (Penzance) I searched for a solution. I found one, however it was expensive. So we blew the budget on Live Channel Pro ($999)- it would have been cheaper to use Formac, but being miles away for any apple retailer, and only having 2 hours left, we had to go for Live Channel, This seems to recognise the video in a much better way than broadcaster does, and picks up the sound too.

Why hasn't apple been able to do with an input what live channel finds so easy? Not sure whether it's the drivers for the Interview device or Broadcaster that has the problem, but there is a conflict there.

We had to put the iMic into the keyboard USB port by the way, and there was enough power to run it.

Anyway - I now have to go and set the whole thing up again in Sheffield, the opening is on Saturday 2nd November at Site Gallery in Sheffield(UK), and Newlyn Gallery in Penzance (UK). It runs for 4 weeks.

Matthew Jarvis

[unlearnthetruth]

wow. very impressive! very cool too, let us know how it turns out