video streaming options 2015?
edit: please skip to second post.
hi everybody,
i need some serious advice on video streaming options.
what i want to do: i have two stations, each equipped with two kinects and two screens. now, i want to show the two kinect-rgb-camera-outputs from station_1 on station_2 and vice versa - pretty much like standard video conferencing, only with two streams/screens - meaning i need to transport four streams in total, at each station two incoming + two outgoing, all over standard internet (probably 16mbit DSL).
since i zoom into these images later, they should be at full res (1080p HD) but 10-15fps is perfectly fine, even 5 fps should work. latency is not a big priority either (if it's lets say less then 10 sec). system is win 8.1 (kinects don't work under macos).
i did some research and found these options:
- use jit.broadcast and transmit via rtsp. i did try this and managed to get a connection but from my first impression this is somewhat outdated (h263 only, really choppy transmission although on a local network).
- use jit.net.send: from what i gathered this is designed for uncompressed streams only, correct? i did find as well something called vipr which could do the compression but this does not seem to work properly on windows (error on startup, avcodec-54.dll missing).
- since at each station i only need the remote signal, not the local one: forget about the kinect rgb-cams and the idea of transmitting out of max altogether and use separate ip-cameras, eg. sony enc-ch210. apart from this being costly (and somehow feels stupid since i need these kinects anyway), would this be better and would i be able to ingest the remote signal into max?
- as a cheaper variation of the ip-cam route: standard webcam combined with something like adobe live encoder (although max can't deal with rmtp as far as i understand?). a friend as well suggested using manycam in combination with skype but since i do not display the camera output locally i guess i won't be able to grab/syphone this...
some other thing i did not look closely at but it sounds sort of cool since it's open source: evercam.io - as far as i understand i could just get a bunch of mobile phones and use these to directly broadcast their camera signal...
so... what is my best bet? or did i forget anything?
since money is an issue (no news here), i would much prefer to accomplish this with the kinect cameras i need anyway, transmitting directly out of max but do i stand any chance to get this working smoothly?
thanks for any advice and insight!
karl
ok, i guess this was way too lengthy - sorry.
let me try again and rephrase:
is there any way to efficiently stream compressed hd-video from one max to another over internet?
(besides jit.qt.broadcast using h.263, a standard from 1996)
thanks for any insights!
k
Hi Karl,
I don't know this can help ?
I've used jit.net.send on mac. and it 's works perfectly. Are you using a network cable to hardwire your 2 computers ?
What is the distance between them ?
Kinects1 model 1414 and 1473 do work on mac but not kinect2.
Again I would go with jit.net.send. always has work like a charm for me :-)
hope this helps
hi phiol, thanks for your reply!
i checked jit.net.send but from what i understand this only works uncompressed over lan (or compressed via vipr but then again that does not seem work on win). unfortunately my two installations will be about 5 km apart so lan is not really an option. i need to be able to compress each signal to about 2mbit/s max (which is what h264-ip-cameras do and even then i'd still need really good internet since i'll have 4 mbit up + 4 mbit down...)
regarding the kinects i just learned today, it's actually impossible to hook up two kinects v2 to a single computer, the maximum is a kinect v1 (maybe more?) + 1 kinect v2 - which i just tested using a 1414 v1 via dp.kinect + a 1520 v2 via dp.kinect2, that works fine. using two kinects v2 simultaneously can only be done with two networked computers (eg. nucs).
k
oh 5 km I see.
mmm this is a shot in the dark but could you try VLC. I've never tried it but I know we can do streaming.
FIle/ open Network/ etc....
Maybe this could work ??
phiol
vlc sounds good and i thought about that as well but: how would this actually work?
- how do i get the signal from max to vlc? can i somehow open a jit.net.send-stream in vlc?
- can vlc simultaneously accept an incoming connection, convert and then actively stream this?
- and on the recieving side: how do i get the video back from vlc into max? or can i open the stream directly in max?
- is it actually possible to run two streaming/recieving instances of vls without them getting confused?
um... anyone managed to get this working before?
And rob comes to the rescue :-) !
Thanks a lot for the great link Rob I'll check this out for future references
phiol
um... sorry for not cheering in, but this does not answer my question. i am aware of this option (very first post, last bullet point) but the idea was to stream without loading it onto the gpu first - which would make no sense in my setup since i only need the video remotely but not locally. apart: i do see that skype is highly efficient with streaming, but it does quite the opposite of what i am looking for since it prioritizes real-time transmission over image quality whereas i am looking for the opposite...
anyway, to get this sorted out: do i understand correctly then, that within max there are no options beyond jit.qt.broadcast with h263-encoding yet? and that, if i should need something more efficient, i'd rather do this outside of max via syphone/camtwister/manycam/skype/whatever (or resort to hardware, eg. ip-cams)?
k