When we finish our satellite campus we hope to set up a direct video link between it and our main campus.
Does anyone know of any good systems for handling this?
In the past we shot the video with a high definition video and burned it to CD then projected it in high definition so that it was almost as though the preacher was really standing there on stage. They are using different facilities now and due to service time differences the preacher is able to speak there live right now.
We are willing to pay for a full and proper system, but we want good quality at a good price (Duh, as though we want a Logitech web cam for $80,000, right?).
We will have a pretty good connection. The central campus will have 3 T1 connections and the satellite campus will have 1 T1. According to the service provider there will only be one hop to the local junction and then one hop to the other campus.
It will be done in off peak hours while there should be nobody else using bandwidth on at least the satellite campus (perhaps a little on the main campus, but there is more room for that here)
What do we need to do this properly?
We were looking at doing high def live online, but according to our techs, the high def we use (which I’m told is higher quality than “regular” high def because we’re stretching it across huge screens) requires 300mbps! No way is that in our budget, LOL!
What I’d like to experiment with is seeing if we could use a high quality codec (like h.264) to compress it in five minute chunks across a little cluster then stream it to the other campus. There’s no way we could do it live, but if the services were spaced far enough apart and we were able to start streaming/encoding as soon as possible as the speaker begins, who knows. I do think you’d need a great codec, and to get any good speed out of it, you’d probably need to encode it using a Linux cluster or something.
I still think this is a real stretch though, especially if the 300mbps is with it already compressed. Please do share your experiences, I’d love to hear what you find.
Someone recommended PictureTel which is now owned by Polycom http://www.polycom.com/home/
I have been searching and found Streambox. http://www.streambox.com/products/products_main.htm
The ACT-L3 HD looks good, but its minimum setting is 2Mbps and if we have just one T1 incoming then that limits us to under 1.5Mbps.
The StreamboxTV whould have lower resolution, but more within range.