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June 13, 2005
Cameras
We are still awaiting a demo setup for the network video cameras. The Sony camera has been eliminated due to its 15 fps limitation when capturing audio. That leaves only the Axis 211A camera. Another vendor reported that there was a 5 second delay before the MPEG4 stream from the Axis camera was available to view on the web. If so, why? For buffering alone, the camera has to keep up in real time.
Having a single source for cameras is a concern. Axis appears to be the only manufacturer of network video cameras that support both audio and 30 fps at 640 by 480. Several cameras provide the desired video but no audio. Since we are preprocessing the audio to remove background noise and increase the clarity of the voices, is there an audio encoder that would let us add the audio to an MPEG4 video stream produced by any network video camera?
Ultimately we were unable to find an appropriate digital camera and went with an analog video conferencing camera. The audio system NETeam AVI designed is incredible. We then started looking at systems to both stream live and record the analog audio and video. The initial recommendation was a Starbak Windows Media 9 system. Starbak demoed their system and the quality of the result was impressive but their version 1 system is proprietary and key interfaces are closed although they are developing API's to address this. With Windows Media 9 encoding there is a significant delay between the time the action occurs and that time you can see it in a video stream. If we want real time streaming we need to add conferencing codecs in parallel with the Starbak solution.
Later, we decided to investigate an Apple QuickTime 7 H.264 (AVC) and AAC solution. We got off to a false start by trying to handle two analog cameras per machine. After spending a long time trying to make 2 cameras work using both QuickTime Broadcaster 7 and Wirecast 2, Apple recommended 1 camera and an external analog to DV converter. Only 1 DV camera can be connected to the FireWire port on a MAC. This solution worked beautifully for recorded video and real-time streaming but doubled the number of PowerMacs needed to compress the video.
Posted by mss at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack