Live Streaming and Recording of Events

[Aren Siekmeier]

Looks good. I've posted some of what we're working on at http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...5&postcount=62. We haven't yet tested the setup with the new, much cheaper equipment, but plan to do so at the Minnesota State Championship in 3 weeks. If the quality turns out, we're excited that we might be able to bring the equipment down to <$50.

We had not tried any of the replay stuff you mentioned in the writeup, so we'll have to check that out. It'd be interesting to hear from 2337 and 1678 as well about overlays, camera quality, streaming hosts, etc.

[Andrew Rudolph]

For roboshow we have a pretty great setup (and Full HD) but its not nearly as inexpensive as you are looking for. But here are some things that will translate to what your looking for.

First the audio, pretty much every mixing board has an AUX send, you can pick which channels, and how they are mixed, and sent out of these ports. We used this at Robocon once YouTube took down our stream for copyright (you live you learn) and it worked well other times we did it. On smaller boards I have seen them labeled as Monitor out.

For encoding we use a Mac mini and two devices to get full HD.
We use a BlackMagic Ultra Studio Mini


Its supposed to take embedded audio but there are some serious driver issues with that and losing sync, so we use a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2

What great about this device is it can use XLR or 1/4" inputs, with individual gain controls and monitoring on the device, so if we have to make a long run for the audio cables its not a problem finding long XLRs and the lights around the knobs blink to the audio so we can see we are getting signal.

As i said before we have used YouTube, but also uStream and LiveStream. Nothing really to say about any of them that hasn't been said. Unfortunately for free there aren't many options.

With that said we had a streaming partner Stream Monkey that gave us super awesome streaming service for the Orlando regional.

[Andrew Rudolph]

Had a few more thoughts after looking through the thread.

Instead of lugging around a big heavy concrete filled bucket or umbrella stand, I would get a lightweight aluminum speaker or lighting stand. I have seen where people modify shorter speaker stands with a long pole for the last segment to get extra height, the stands are designed to keep 50lb speakers up, so making it tall and putting a few pounds is safe.

We used a GoPro for wide angle shots pretty effectively, we also have used a HD security camera to get some other interesting shots.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by Aren Siekmeier

Looks good. I've posted some of what we're working on at http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...5&postcount=62. We haven't yet tested the setup with the new, much cheaper equipment, but plan to do so at the Minnesota State Championship in 3 weeks. If the quality turns out, we're excited that we might be able to bring the equipment down to <$50.

We had not tried any of the replay stuff you mentioned in the writeup, so we'll have to check that out. It'd be interesting to hear from 2337 and 1678 as well about overlays, camera quality, streaming hosts, etc.

How did this camera and setup work out for you guys? I am looking into putting together some higher quality streams for St. Louis going forward and this is a great price point. I went ahead and purchased the camera just to play around with it and see what we could do.

[Aren Siekmeier]

Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux

How did this camera and setup work out for you guys? I am looking into putting together some higher quality streams for St. Louis going forward and this is a great price point. I went ahead and purchased the camera just to play around with it and see what we could do.

I've been out of the country for most of our events, but I'll send some of our webcast people over here.

[bvisness]

I don't think we ever used the cheap camera for an actual broadcast. We're using the GoPro again this year because we wanted to use that widescreen webcam on our robot instead.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by bvisness

I don't think we ever used the cheap camera for an actual broadcast. We're using the GoPro again this year because we wanted to use that widescreen webcam on our robot instead.

I received it yesterday and it does seem perfect for on-board robot use. The field of view is pretty great for a cheap webcam but the video quality was somewhat 'grainy' and had some noise. I suppose you get what you pay for and the GoPro is still a great inexpensive solution compared to some of the high end A/V solutions out there.