Woz WebCast

Watch the webcastWhy two webcastsWhat you will needWhat you can expectHow did we do it

 

Watch the Webcast

Click here to launch the Webcast from a Streaming Sever

Click here to watch the Webcast from a HTTP Stream

Why two webcasts

We are offering both a true streaming webcast, and a HTTP link to the same content. The streaming version will play immediately for users that have plenty (+500kbs) of bandwidth.

If you are experiencing problems with playing back the stream, you should try the HTTP version instead. It will buffer content until it has enough to play back reliably. Your wait time will vary according to your networking connection. If you have Quicktime Pro installed, you will be able to save the fully downloaded Quicktime movie, but be forewarned that it is 558 MB in size.

What You will Need

What You can Expect

We have tested this enviroment as fully as we can, given our puny resources. The video stream itself is a compromise between as good a quality as we can muster, while having it work for a home high speed network connection. As a result, the frame rate for the video may not quite as good as you are used to getting on your TV set. Bear with us, and enjoy hearing what Steve Wozniak has to say. For once, the medium is not necessarily the message.

How did we do it

We used Quicktime Broadcaster to encode a live source from a Canon XL1 camera. We used a DV feed from the camera directly into a G4 550 mhz dual processor PowerMac running Mac OS X 10.2.4. The camera was attached via a 15 foot firewire cable, which is about as far as you get.

The audio was encoded from house sound, and fed into the audio in jack on the G4 PowerMac via a small (4x2) mixer. This gave us a couple of advantages; better audio level control, and the ability to directly sample audio at the rate we were broadcasting, instead of taking a DV audio source and resampling it on the fly.

Quicktime broadcaster is available at:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/broadcaster/

A Single rack mount Xserver is running Quicktime Streaming Server, with a theoretical maximum of 1000 active streams. You can get your own copy of Quicktime Streaming Server at

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qtss/

It's available for just about all popular computing platforms.

We had over 325 unique connections for our live stream, and had over 100 simultaneous viewers. One viewer in NYC responded back that he was able to watch the entire broadcast without interruption.

Thanks to everyone for making this event happen, and for Steve Wozniak's permission to broadcast this event.