I’ll explain you how to do a live streaming using Microsoft Encoder 3. Me and my friends tried out this in our boarding place using a simple local area network and succeeded. It’s not a big deal of course. Most of the work (almost all) is done by the Encoder 3. If you have a powerful machine then you can stream to many number of hosts. Here is the way how to do it.
Install Microsoft Encoder 3 in your machine. And I assume you have the Encoder installed on your machine for the further explanation. I did this in my machine which is running on Windows 7 Professional.
I didn’t explain here how to create a peer to peer connection between two machines thus it will make the post big, but you can get plenty of resources in a simple googling.
Once you set up a network check whether both machines are accessible. In your browser type the other machine’s IP like this http://yourIP. If both machines are networked and if a server is running on port 80 you’ll get a response. There are plenty of ways to check the connection but I recommend this here since for the Silverlight Live Streaming you need the IIS as well. By this check you make sure that both machines are connected and well as the IIS is ready to be used.
Then start the Encoder. Click on Live Encoding. Select your webcam as Live source and if you have a sound device select it as a Audio device. Cue your live source.(your webcam). In this time you could able to see your web cam’s screen in the Encoder preview panel. Select the output as Broadcast. (Default port will be 8080 you can change it if you want). You can also set the maximum number of connections here.
Hit the Start. That’s it you are live now in the internal LAN.
Open your Windows media player (or any other player which has network support). Type the following mms://yourmachineIP:8080.
Wow you are online…. Your peer also have to do the same thing. If you listen to his IP and if he listen to your IP then it’s a local Skype. A Local Skype without the Internet.
If you have another machine in your network with a media server you can publish to that point and ask the media server to handle the connections. Here we don’t have media server and I used the broadcasting, where the source and server is our local machine.
If you want to go even further and want to watch inside the browser as we watch live matches in the YouTube just put an object tag and make it’s source as the above address. Really cool real streaming over the web. 🙂
Yuppie !!! 🙂
But unfortunately Encoder doesn’t provide an SDK to use the feature in our own applications. I put a forum regarding this and I got the following answer from a Moderator
“Unfortunately you would need to have Encoder on both PCs to perform something like this since we don’t have a way to deploy our SDK any other way at the moment. Without revealing state secrets, I believe that "Live" mode is returning to the free sku in our next version, so all your peer(s) would need to do is install the free version and use your application based on our SDK.”
The link to the updated forum :
But in the Encoder 4 it comes with an SDK. But I did not put out my hands into that yet.
Versatile Digital DNA 