Live Video Streaming From Church

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CaseyBlackburn

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Dec 10, 2006
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Obviously I have some how lost my google skills or something but I can not find anything for this situation so hopefully someone can help.

I'm trying to help my church get live video streaming of the sermons online but I'm not quite sure of the software I need. My church already records all the sermons and makes them available online so they already have the camera setup they need. I want something along the lines of like Shoutcast but for video. I want the source to send data to a higher bandwidth server that can then redistribute it to any viewers. I know uStream is available but we'd prefer to have something of our own setup. The computers in the booth run Windows XP and we have a co-located Linux server running CentOS. Can anyone help out?

I also hope this is the best forum area to post this in.
 
Well, I would really recommend uStream, but if you're dead set against it, check out VLC player. I'm no expert on it, but I think you could set it up on the WinXP system, then set it up on the CentOS server, and have CentOS re-broadcast the stream to your viewers. (setup the WinXP comp to stream, then tell the server to get it's source video from that stream)
 
How many people do you anticipate watching your stream?
If you're planning for anything for more than say 10 users, you'll want to look into paid streaming services.
 
Keiichi said:
How many people do you anticipate watching your stream?
If you're planning for anything for more than say 10 users, you'll want to look into paid streaming services.
Click to expand...

Why? We expect maybe 15-30 users max at any time. The co-located server has the bandwidth. It has a 100mbit upstream connection if that is what you are worried about.
 
^Streaming video is a lot harder to pull off reliabily than it looks, but anyway... here's the free version of what you'll need.

Windows Media Encoder on the broadcasting machine
Darwin Streaming Server on the server

Basically you'll want to setup WME to output to an MP4 format to the Darwin server. So that it can stream it. You'll want to test for quality and bandwidth etc. but that's the quick, dirty and free way.
 
We don't necessarily need a free way, we just want to have it hosted to where we have full control over it.
 
100mbit should work for that many users. I'm assuming VLC can handle that. Just do any transcoding at the WinXP machine. I'm no expert at video, but the h.264 codec might work pretty well?
 
The quicktime/darwin solution is probably the best option. I do believe that WME can broadcast to a darwin or a quicktime streaming server. (as long as you use hinted MP4 formats.)

If you want to setup a dedicated machine, you could also get a mac with OSX server on it, on the cheap. (I'm not sure what kinds of discounts/vendors you have acces to as a church, but there should be a lot of people willing to sell stuff on the cheap.)

That really is the easiest way of doing things. Using a QT based server will make it easy for your users as well since they don't have to go codec/plugin hunting. You can just point them to apple and tell them to get quicktime. If they're using Macs already even easier.

You also could get a mac with quicktime broadcaster and that will make things even easier to setup and connect to the darwin/quicktime streaming server.
 
My church runs video streaming as well, and we went through many different options before settling down with Windows Media Encoder and Windows Media Services on Server 2003. We did the whole uStream idea for a bit, but depending on your ISP at your church it might be painful in terms of audio / video quality. (We have DSL - nothing else available). I do have to say that a few paid solutions don't offer too high of resolutions for the cost. At least for us, it was more cost effective to stream ourselves than to go with a paid host.

You can actually stream just through Windows Media Encoder if you have a beefy enough connection (i.e. Cable / FiOS). You just have to open ports to the PC running WME. If you have an extra Windows based server, you can install Windows Media Services and use that. That is the solution that we use except that we send the video to one of our church members (with a fast broadband connection) and have a server housed there on a VPN tunnel to the church. Its been working great and we can easily do 10 - 15 connections.

FYI - you might be able to get some decend discounts on Windows Server through TechSoup.

In terms of Darwin Streaming Server / QuickTime Streaming Server, you could try, thought our attempts weren't too successful. Darwin needed a lot babysitting from us to make it work.It really isn't fun trying to troubleshoot issues constantly on a Sunday morning right before the start of a service.
 
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