Video capture and streaming advice wanted

[shane2943]

Hi everyone. Hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year celebration!

So, my pastor emailed myself and our head audio tech asking about getting a video feed from our little camera (Sony EVI-D30) to another room in our church. I'm very green to video capture and streaming. So far, the streaming will just be local (no web streaming but I'm sure this will open the door to it).

Here's what we have:

Camera: Sony EVI-D30 (will possibly upgrade to the EVI-D70) connected to a switcher via S-video
Computer that will serve the stream: Home built Core i7 based with 8GB of DDR3 ram, >2TB HDD space, plenty of available PCI slots of different types, running Windows 7 Pro. It's primary purpose right now is EasyWorship, but being an i7, it ought to multitask just fine and serve the stream too. Plus, we want to be able to put the camera's video through EasyWorship too as a background.
Network: Unknown...as of now. Ethernet at least, but not sure of the speed or what the make/model of the church's hub(s) or switcher(s) are. Will find this out though.
Computer that will receive the stream: unknown. There is one already in the room (it's a youth worship hall and they use Easyworship on this PC) and I will check this one out as well. As long as it will play full screen videos smoothly, I figure it *should* be ok.

Ok, we're not looking for HD. SD is fine for us as we're not a broadcast production church. Been looking at capture cards but not sure which one to get. Also, not sure on a streaming method. I've seen some recommendations of streaming via VLC player, but wanted other opinions.

Budget is not huge, but not tiny either.

Thanks in advance for any help! If you need details or clarification, I'm happy to provide any info I can, and if I don't know it, I'll find out!

[sempei13]

What's the distance from the source to where the video will be shown? I'm thinking you might want to distribute it with an analog signal to the distant room. That solves the problem of turning analog into digital and back for display. It also solves the problem of latency that switching format will introduce.

Paul

[sien]

Hi Shane,
I would recommend adding a Canopus ADVC110 as a capture card.

We have been using livestream.com with the Adobe Flash Media Encoder
(it's a free download) and it's been quite decent.

If you can run ethernet cable to the other room, you probably could just do a direct feed.

[shane2943]

Originally Posted by sempei13

What's the distance from the source to where the video will be shown? I'm thinking you might want to distribute it with an analog signal to the distant room. That solves the problem of turning analog into digital and back for display. It also solves the problem of latency that switching format will introduce.

Paul

Hi, Paul. Thank you for the reply!

The distance is pretty great. I'd say >3-400ft and up one story. Plus, an audio mix from the board needs to go with the video. Running analog cables from the main sanctuary to the youth worship hall is no easy undertaking.

Latency is not that big of a concern, as long as we can delay the audio to match the video, then it'll be fine. This will be primarily for overflow viewing at first, but I'm sure will open the door to internet streaming later on.

Originally Posted by sien

Hi Shane,
I would recommend adding a Canopus ADVC110 as a capture card.

We have been using livestream.com with the Adobe Flash Media Encoder
(it's a free download) and it's been quite decent.

If you can run ethernet cable to the other room, you probably could just do a direct feed.

Thank you for the reply! I will definitely check out the card you mentioned! Thanks!

As for the Ethernet run, I'm not sure it would be feasible as we'd have the same dilemma as running analog cables. The run is very far, and would also be very difficult unless we just ran the cable along the floor and taped it down with tons of gaff tape.

If I can locate the Ethernet patch bay, and then locate the two runs from the booth and from the youth hall, then I can simply patch those together for one continuous run. I'd have to boost the signal though because that would be approaching 6-800ft and I'm not sure if a computer's NIC can push an Ethernet connection that far without help.

[shane2943]

Ok, so, because of reliability issues with the remote PC, we're thinking about going a different route with streaming (for now). Do y'all have any experience with VGA+audio over cat5 extenders? Do they require a dedicated lan drop, or can they run through the church's 100/full network (IP-based)?

Any recommended brands?

Something like this is what we're looking for right now: Amazon.com: Tripp Lite B130-101A VGA Over Cat5e... <---I don't know if that one requires a dedicated drop or not.

Thanks in advance!!!

[TJ Krusinski]

Firstly going from Analog to SDI back to Analog will not introduce more than a few lines of delay.

Cat5 extenders extend signal over Cat5, not over IP, so you'd need a single run to the room, of course you could go through a patch bay.

[shane2943]

Originally Posted by TJ Krusinski

Firstly going from Analog to SDI back to Analog will not introduce more than a few lines of delay.

Cat5 extenders extend signal over Cat5, not over IP, so you'd need a single run to the room, of course you could go through a patch bay.

Sorry for the delayed reply. And thank you for your reply!

Do you know if there would be any issue with daisy-chaining a couple pairs of these? The run we have to do is pretty long. Too long for the reach for one set of cat5 VGA extenders.

Or do you know of a VGA extender that will fire a signal close to 500ft (maybe even more)?

[JeffReckart]

First two assumptions...
1:> camera/switcher has Composite/Svideo/Componet outputs
2:> from camera/video source to pc in overflow room has wired network connections, ie high enough bandwidth...

There is product made for watching your home tv/cable box/dvd/whatever over the internet, for when you are away from home, say on a business trip.

It's called a Slingbox, which costs about $129 to start. Why not plug the output of your camera/switcher/video setup into a slingbox and watch it on the PC in the overflow room?
This keeps your EasyWorship computer in the main room, from bogging down, by the slingbox handling all the streaming. not sure of the video quality, but as Slingbox also comes in a hd version, and you have a hardwired network in place, it should be atleast acceptable.

It also would do both Video & audio. Just run a cable from the overflow/youth room pc to the mix console, which it probably already has!

Would be interested in if this works good enough!

JR

[shane2943]

Hey guys, just wanted to pop in and share our solution.

We ended up using a Tripp-Lite VGA+audio over LAN device to send the audio and mix from the board to the overflow room. Worked pretty well except for the audio degradation was pretty severe, but the video was superb. The audio was livable with lots of EQ, but thankfully the presentation was spoken word only so I focused the EQ there. We had a few people use the overflow room (mostly parents with kids) and we got quite a bit of praise and thanks from some of them!

The Tripp-Lite VGA+audio over LAN devices we use are able to send 1024X768 resolution over 1000ft of cat5. We ran them at 1280X1024 and had no issues (with the video). Total cable length was probably 600-750ft.

We still intend to set up streaming, but this worked for us for overflow purposes.