Webcasting setups/help

[dcbrown]

The kind folks at Newnex Technology in CA got back to me. Ummm. Dumb user on device error. I forgot to add the gender bender cable to the setup.

"You should use a CAT5 cable that is wired straight through with our Qu-Cat adapter. The activity light will illuminate when the two repeaters are connected to each other and powered."

Adding the adapter into the cabling lets everything work.

Why is this a big deal? IEEE 1394 has ~15' limit. Long firewire cables can work with some DV camera setups - sometimes, maybe - but its out of spec so ymmv. Evidently neither of my two Sonys nor the Canopus a/d have what it takes to work with the really long cables. The result is the PC doesn't see anything connected when long cables are used.

The FireNex repeater gets me up to 260' away from the camera or other DV source which uses 1394 as the transport. This is huge because it allows the webcast station to be set up where convienent rather than snugged up against the arena feed/drop. These aren't cheap, but an engineered solution is always perferred over the adhoc. This also means the video stream stays digital.

The original idea was to use the FireNex repeater to pump the DV info from the Canopus which would be located at the arena feed/drop location. The problem with that strategy is that the audio isn't cleanly separated from the DV source for webcasting. I'm still pondering a reasonable solution for that, but for now I'm looking at going back to using long analog cables to feed the audio/video from the arena drop to a semi-remote PC location... as long as semi-remote is within 50'. Feed the analog into the Canopus and then into the PC.

Eventually I'd like to put together (maybe next year?) a webcast "kit" which has all the unusual pieces - cables, converters, etc - so it could be utilized by other regional committees. Its not reasonable to buy the setup for something like this and have it used only once a year.