Wireless Live Feed Techniques

[Rey Lowe]

I've been doing video and audio live feeds for various events that either have a holding room for participants to watch the show live or simply an overflow area set up for viewing the show. Up to this point, I've been using video baluns and running Cat6 cable to carry the signal.

While this has worked very well, I'm looking for ways to cut out the time needed for running and taping those cables down. Has anyone discovered an effective way to wirelessly send the signal to another room that doesn't cost a fortune?

I had the idea of using a Livestream Broadcaster Mini to send the signal to a Roku box, but it would be dependent on the venue's wi-fi. Could I simply set up my own router without internet to accomplish this? Ideas? Thoughts?

[Adam Grunseth]

Originally Posted by Rey Lowe

I've been doing video and audio live feeds for various events that either have a holding room for participants to watch the show live or simply an overflow area set up for viewing the show. Up to this point, I've been using video baluns and running Cat6 cable to carry the signal.

While this has worked very well, I'm looking for ways to cut out the time needed for running and taping those cables down. Has anyone discovered an effective way to wirelessly send the signal to another room that doesn't cost a fortune?

I had the idea of using a Livestream Broadcaster Mini to send the signal to a Roku box, but it would be dependent on the venue's wi-fi. Could I simply set up my own router without internet to accomplish this? Ideas? Thoughts?

Since you are just talking about sending video to an audience for viewing, not production quality video to a switcher/recorder in a live multi-cam setup, you do have some options.

I don't know about a Roku box with the Livestream Broadcaster without the internet, but you can do it with VLC media player. You will need a laptop to stream from, and a way to capture the live video feed to that laptop. That laptop will also need to be powerful enough to encode the video in real time.

You will also need a second computer with VLC installed to receive the stream. This computer doesn't need to be powerful. I use a $200 HP Notebook from Best Buy.

First, set up an ad hoc network between the two computer.

On the transmitting computer, launch VLC, then click on Media and stream. From the resulting dialog box, click on "Capture Device" tab, then select the video and audio device that is capturing your video (usually these are the same). Then click the stream button.

A new dialog box will come up. Click on Next. This will bring up the destination setup. From the destination dropdown I usually select "RTP / MPEG Transport Stream" as this has worked fairly well for me in the past. Click on Next again.

This will take you to the transcoding page. To make things easy, I suggest using one of the pre-defined profiles. Typically I go with "Video- H.264 + MP3 (MP4)" but you can also click the button to edit the specific transcoder settings. You might be need to play around here a bit if bandwidth is limited or your transmitting PC isn't able to encode the selected format in real time.

Clicking on Next yet one more time will take you to the Optional Setup screen. There isn't much of interest here, but you do get the Generated stream output string. This is useful if you want to launch VLC from a command line in the future to stream in the exact same way. I built a simple batch file that I can launch that will start streaming, that way I don't have to go through the setup every time.

On the receiving computer you should simply be able to watch your stream by again launching VLC, clicking on Media, then clicking on Open Network Stream. You will be prompted to enter the network URL, so for the case of an RTP stream all you need to do is type rtp://(ip address of sending computer) and that is it. Click on Play and you should be watching your stream in real time.

So there you go- Live, wireless streaming with no expensive proprietary hardware and no internet connection required.

[Rey Lowe]

Thanks Adam!

Has this setup worked for you with some distance (200-300') between the two computers?