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Topic: Advice forDemocaster - Webcasting community events (Read 1659 times) previous topic - next topic
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Advice forDemocaster - Webcasting community events

This year I had a prototype built for the a UK e-democracy project that essentially added webcast archiving to live MP3 or Ogg webcasts streamed via Icecast2 and encoded via Winamp with Oddcast.  We also used fwink to share webcam images every five seconds.

The goal is to create the lowest cost, lowest bandwidth required webcasting system for small community groups and governments (like Parish or Township Councils).

Example webcast:
http://www.democaster.org - type in webcast number:  40

Next Steps

Anyway, we have been asked to upgrade the demonstration into something that can be used by say 15 community groups in a pilot run over the next year.  So here are a couple of questions to start out with.

1. MP3 Encoding - Our goal is share 16kbps voice streams to allow webcasting from a computer with a slower connection and to ensure the broadest access - live and via "podcasts" of meetings.  From Windows, we've had trouble with our Oddcast or Lame settings under 32kbps.  We aren't sure. Any advice?

2. Ogg - I'd love to use Ogg as much as possible. In fact, we convert Ogg streamed content into MP3 automatically after the live webcast to give folks on-demand streaming and download options in both formats.  We want to embed a player option, and Flash supports MP3 so that would be easy.  Ideally we'd have an applet that plays Ogg or MP3 without requiring users to get Winamp or download relatively obscure add-ons to mainstream players.  Without this, may have to leave the higher quality Ogg format (for voice at lower bitrates in particular). Any advice?

Thanks,
Steven Clift

P.S. This was the original vision for Democaster:
http://dowire.org/wiki/Democaster

Advice forDemocaster - Webcasting community events

Reply #1 –
Quote
1. MP3 Encoding - Our goal is share 16kbps voice streams to allow webcasting from a computer with a slower connection and to ensure the broadest access - live and via "podcasts" of meetings.  From Windows, we've had trouble with our Oddcast or Lame settings under 32kbps.  We aren't sure. Any advice?
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MP3 lowest bitrate, with 32, 44.1 and 48Khz is 32Kbps. You simply have to resample to lower than that ( say, either 16Khz 22.05Khz or 24Khz), to be able to use down to 16 and 8Kbps.

About your question about .ogg, the first result for "ogg+java+player" in google points to this URL : [a href="http://www.jcraft.com/jorbis/]http://www.jcraft.com/jorbis/[/url]

That could be of help.