Here's a follow up to yesterday's webcast from the London Flash Platform User Group. We ran a 2 to 3 hour long webcast and had about 20 to 30 people watch the event. Our webcasting setup was very basic with only a laptop, a shaky WLAN signal and a standard webcam. Nevertheless the broadcast was watchable and I feel encouraged enough to do this on a regular basis, maybe with better equipment next time. While I have a DV cam which could be used for the video I think the sound quality could really be improved by a decent microphone (hint: any sponsors want to donate a wireless lavalier mic suitable for webcasting to us?). We offer eternal thankfulness and regular name-mentioning in return :-)

Some people have asked what bitrate the broadcast was. We tried both 128kbps as well as 256kbps and finally settled on 256kbps. This was the combined bandwidth for video and audio.
We were using the new Flix 8 Live Encoder which is the first tool to offer the On2 VP6 codec for live Flash video. I think the difference to Spark was clearly obvious.
The Flix application performed reasonably well for us with 2 crashes throughout the day. We also had one lockup whereby Flix would not reconnect to the FMS machine and we had to reboot the encoding machine.

For everyone who's missed the broadcast I have set up another feed, again using Flix 8 Live. I'm just filiming myself at work right now but will try an outdoor shot later. For some reason my webcams are having trouble with outdoor conditions and terribly overexposing the image. This feed runs at 128kbps. Note that this feed will only be up today and possibly tomorrow.

I want to send out a special thank you to Tink who's organizing the LFPUG event every month.


Posted on August 25, 2006 at 4:52 PM. 6450 views. 9 comments. Print