Thursday, May 3, 2007

Infrastructure Series: Streaming Setup

At CCM we have two very different streaming systems right now. We have our regular Internet Streams, and we also have our Live Streaming Solution for our Multi-Site Church. Both work off many of the same systems, but operate very differently. Let's start with our Internet Streaming setup. Currently we have 3 encoders...2 in production, 1 in standby mode (manual, nothing fancy yet, just a spare). The encoders are all built with the following:

Hardware:
- homebuilt rackmount dual core computers
- Osprey 210 Cards
- 1 to 8 Analog Composite Video & RCA Stereo Distribution Amplifier

Software:
- Windows XP
- Osprey Drivers / Utilities
- Windows Media Encoder / Real Producer

Server Side we have an interesting mix. In the process of getting our distributed network for Multi-Site streaming in place, we ended up getting 75Mb of Internet as part of the deal. Long story with Time Warner, if anyone ever wants to know email me... On the servers we have, again a home built box with some redundancy for our Windows Media Distribution Point (Win 2k3, WMS, etc) and we have a leased server from the Planet where we run Real Server.

Currently we are running the following streams:

WMS:
- 282 Kbps (16:9 Video 360x240 Resolution)
- 30 Kbps (16:9 Video 180x120 Resolution)
- 14-20 Kbps Audio Only Stream
- 14-20 Kbps Spanish Audio Only Stream (translated on the fly)

Real:
- 250 Kbps (16:9 Video 360x240 Resolution)
- 30 Kbps (16:9 Video 180x120 Resolution)

Right now all of these streams are being done from 1 Encoder Computer. (Dell Optiplex with Core 2 Duo / 2 GB Ram) ViewCast offers a software called simulstream which allows you to fire up multiple encoders on a single computer using a single osprey card to create completely seperate streams.

Our Second Encoder computer is being used to test some higher bitrate streams. Right now I am testing the possibility of upgrading to using the Flash Media Encoder to provide a Real Time Flash Stream.


My other upgrade project is to get a Black Magic Capture board and offer a full resolution (720x480) stream.


Here is a look at our streaming setup. Our Live multisite is also diagrammed here, but I will cover that in a later article.


1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would be very interested in hearing how the Flash streaming goes. We are in the process of changing our streaming platform on recorded content to flash at Sugar Creek Baptist Church. The next step was to also try flash for a live stream that we plan rolling out. I enjoy reading your blog and thanks for posting the information.