Broadcasting audio

[unhappy_mage]

Hi guys,
First off, sorry for the long paragraph - I haven't straightened all this out in my head yet. Read the first bit and make suggestions. I'll restate more clearly if I have to.

Looking for an application here. Some friends of mine are getting married in a few months, and her parents (in China) won't be able to be there in person. What would you suggest as a way to stream the audio to them, so they can listen? My first thought was to rent a Ventrilo or Teamspeak server, but it appears that the codecs with Ventrilo only go to 70 KB/s, and Teamspeak even lower. The church they're holding the wedding at will have Comcast cable by the wedding, and in this area it's very stable, but they're not getting the business-class connection, so we can't run a server directly from it. So if there's a place that rents Shoutcast servers or something by-the-month, that'd work. This is the only thing we'll be doing, so bandwidth isn't a huge concern - we'd just like it to sound nice. CPU usage on the sending end would be nice to keep low - we'll likely be keeping a high-quality archival copy, so anything that is going to hurt that is Right Out. I've done long recordings with this setup before, and CPU usage is only 10% or so, so almost anything should be okay.

Has anyone used Ventrilo at maximum bitrate with a good mic? How does that sound?

To summarize: a protocol or app that will let us send audio from a "residential" connection to a server (we'll rent hosting for a month when the event draws near) and from there to China. Something Windows Media Player deals with would be best.

 

[fazzman]

I would say shoutcast would be the best option because it will offer the best quality of sound to them.

 

[Canon]

Yea, I don't know anything about shoutcast etc. but it sounds like you could use skype...

Voice to voice communication with Skype is great in my experience. As for wanting a copy of the ceromony etc... may I suggest just sending them a copy of the video? I'm sure someone will be taping at the wedding.

You could setup Skype with a webcam too so they can see the action. I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for or not but in my oppinion Skype has decent sound/video quality and may work well with a decent mic and webcam.

I suppose this wouldn't work as well if you mean it needs to be sent to multiple PCs. I know Skype does have conference call capabilities which may work (of course everyone would need to mute their mics so as not to interrupt what the others are listening to).

 

[dandragonrage]

icecast2

 

[Barstool]

Google Talk FTW.

 

[unhappy_mage]

I would say shoutcast would be the best option because it will offer the best quality of sound to them.

Where's a good place to rent a Shoutcast server? This is the list Shoutcast links to, but there are no user reviews, and all of them look exactly the same - all online, more than 99.5% uptime for 2k6, listener experience "good". Any suggestions? This place seems to be the cheapest of the ones I looked at for 128k streams.

Google talk doesn't say anything about bandwidth allowed. SkyPE seems to take up to 128 kbit, but they list it as "3-16 KB/s" which leads me to believe the average/actual rate is a good bit lower.

WRT saving a copy, I'm gonna use this as the master audio track, and there will probably be several people taping; I'm going to try to get several angles of video and splice everything into one DVD. This is going to be quite a production.