Streaming sessions

[Ruth Suehle]

Ooyala is going to help us with streaming Flock sessions. We just need
equipment. "Just." I'm trying to stretch budgets from everywhere just to
get all of Flock happening, so there's not a lot leftover for buying camera
equipment! Possibly some, but I don't think I can swing enough for nine
rooms.

Thus, two questions:

- Can anyone suggest reasonably inexpensive cameras I should look at
purchasing? Whatever is the least expensive that isn't going to be so low
quality, it's useless.

- Does anyone have a video camera suitable that you'd be willing to lend to
the cause? We'd have it set up in the rooms all day, but of course you're
welcome to take it back to your hotel for safekeeping at night.

Here's the information from Ooyala about how we can do the streaming. There
are two options:

1) Hook up a camera to a computer running a software encoder via USB
or Firewire.  Many of our customers use Flash Media Live Encoder,
which is not open source.  VLC might be an open source option here as
well, but I haven't personally used it in this setup.

2) Use a hardware encoder such as a Terradeck cube
(http://www.teradek.com/pages/cube). These can take input from SDI or
HDMI output on any camera and then re-encode them to push to a
streaming server at whichever provider you select.



Does anyone know whether VLC or something else is an option for #1? I think
the Teradek is prohibitively expensive, especially if we also have to buy
cameras.

Thanks!
Ruth