My First Attempt at Streaming

So when @wyliemac asked last night if anyone had a webcam to stream the Ignite Columbus 3 presentations tonight, I said I did, and would be glad to help out, thinking I could pop my Macbook up there and use the built in webcam, if that’s all we could come up with.

As I considered it last night, and through this morning, I decided on a different track. I borrowed a video camera from work (I’m the one who normally uses it, and in fact I’ll be using it Monday morning, so it’s not like it’s missing from work or anything.). It’s an old Panasonic that normally records to tape, but which has a firewire connector. Running the firewire through to my Macbook Pro at lunch today and then going out to Ustream and creating an account allowed me to fire on the video camera, and send the video out to the web. My test worked perfectly, so that’s the gear I packed up to go to Ignite tonight.

Once on site, it was just a matter of finding good spot to capture the presentations from, a power source, and getting connected to the OSU wireless. Ran into a bit of a problem with Safari crashing, but discovered that as long as I had the Ustream set to DV Audio, it would crash when I tried to connect, but if I had it set to another audio source when it connected and switched it to DV audio, it worked fine. Go figure! Anyway, it took me about 5 minutes to figure that out, and that was really the last hiccup I had. I think, for a first effort, it turned out rather well, but you can see for yourself at the Ustream archive.

Even if you don’t really care about my adventures in live streaming, the presentations were pretty darn good and are worth your while as well!

Follow these topics: Tech