simple VLC Multicast and SAP announce it all on your LAN
"Lee Dowling
School → Posted Friday 11th June 2010 11:03 GMT
In World Cup streaming to choke corporate networks, doomsayers predict
My employers have asked me to look into this for them - they are a school and apparently one of the matches is shown at 3pm and they think teachers will be tempted to let kids watch it / watch it themselves online. The TV technology we have is old-hat, but the large-display data projectors in every classroom
.... Any ideas on helping me achieve this will be gratefully received."
simple, just follow the old Documentation:Streaming HowTo/Command Line Examples - VideoLAN Wiki and replace the multicast dst=239.255.12.42 address with the 224.0.0.1, the SAP ANNOUNCE is interesting to you too as then you can have any VLC turn on that SAP announce option and see the name you gave on the cli line and connect directly to its underline IP and port with a simple click for the VLC viewer anywhere on the LAN
or use the VLC GUi wizard to start with setting the multicast address and SAP announce text etc until your happy with the cli...
if you want to use a digital DVB card of whatever make to get the best input quality for realtime x264 encoding and streaming then have a read of this page too Documentation:Streaming HowTo/Stream a DVB Channel - VideoLAN Wiki as it can get a little odd.
keep in mind there are several parts to any VLC line ,the input can be anything from a local ready made local AVC.H.264.AAC..mp4 file , a DVB card input, all the way to a remote URL file on some web server somewhere, then you have the streaming options totally separate, then you have the Codec Encoder option to tweak, stick to AVC/H.264/x264 options up to around 1.5Mbit/s bitrate should be fine for your normal HD content, AAC or mp3 audio options, and mp4/ts containers and you should be fine.
for instance here's a good example of how a DVB card, US HD in this case , their internal veetle browser plug-in , and a generic external current VLC using x264 realtime encoding to feed http://www.veetle.com/view/index.html#4b8e3c391e48b gives VERY good quality even for wasteful unicast streaming, swap that external Unicast out for internal LAN VLC multicast and your on a massive bandwidth winner all the way home.
OC if your feeding the local LAN from inside the network from a DVB-T card USB2 or whatever plug into a reasonable dual , quad Intel E4400 or better PC and VLC multicasting then you dont use ANY web/WAN bandwidth at all, and its all DVB+VLC multicast serving all your multicast SAP ANNOUNCE viewers No problem, you can even setup two or more and use them as backups or streaming other channels and content.... if you like .
start off with something simple like streaming a ready made video file , download this veetle test 500Kbit/s 16:9 ratio AVC/H.264 file will be fine for that http://www.megaupload.com/?d=7Z3I2XCA as your input and set multicast to all the PCs on the LAN and see them all tune into this ready made file stream first..to show you it really does work for the given group of PC's on your LAN without router or switch problems interfering with the multicast packets on the LAN from anywhere inside your LAN etc, enjoy and be happy.
AND Most of all, telling and actually Showing other people and students how its actually done and to start them using this VLC HD multicast everywhere you go, help spread the simple x264 AVC high quality encoding + VLC multicast streaming word.
oh and you might want to look at these 16:9 ratios for downscaling your input feeds to a generic screen size to save CPU cycles if your connected PC is not so beefy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_resolutions
downscaling real 1920×1080 16:9 content to 1024×576 16:9 1.778 589,824 is a good compromise if you cant get your real-time encoding quality quite right to start with.