Send multiple streams with QuickTime Broadcaster

Jan 11, '06 06:50:00AM

Contributed by: zpjet

Do you like the moments when you see impossible happening?

I'm preparing for QuickTime streaming of a concert. While part of the audience is from the third world, I was looking for a cheap way to stream more streams in different qualities. I have one DV camera with analog input, and a PowerBook to run QuickTime Broadcaster and Darwin Streaming Server while using Automatic Unicast (very easy installation and setup, btw).

  1. I made a copy of the Broadcaster in Applications folder and ran both copies. To my surprise, I was able to broadcast two streams from one computer! Only one could be from the DV camera, but I can hook up audio to the Line In and stream only music as a slow connection (mono in 48 kbps) alternative to the hi-fi stream in H.264 (about 250 kbps). Just make sure you give the streams different names.
  2. Inspired, I got courage to hook up my ol' iBook G3. How? Using the FireWire hub in the Apple Cinema Display. I have to say this setup looks weird: two computers and one camera on one hub ... but when I launched Broadcaster on the iBook, I found out I can broadcast two streams from one camera! So now I have three streams: hi-fi one, sound only and the third one, sound with hi-res pictures as a "slide show," all announced on the same streaming server.
For the third stream, I wanted a very low frame rate, let's say one picture every ten seconds. The Broadcaster doesn't let me enter lower value than 1 in "Frames per second:" field. So I saved the broadcast settings (in the File menu) and opened the file (it's in XML format) in TextEdit or Property List Editor. It was just too easy to locate and change the desired real number value:
Root: video: compression: frameRate: 0.1
After launching Broadcaster by opening this saved file, I was streaming at .1 FPS. Fast enough for the audience to see what's going on on stage in 640x480 while still maintaining ISDN speeds.

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