[theora] Theora for webcam/conferencing use

[Basil Mohamed Gohar]

On 10/16/2009 08:45 AM, John Kintree wrote:
> On Thursday 15 October 2009 11:11 am, Basil Mohamed Gohar wrote:
>   
>> http://aalimraan.hidayahonline.net:8000/basil-at-work.ogv
>> Works great in Firefox 3.5 & VLC.  ;)
>>     
> This is brilliant.  Would you please tell us what hardware 
> you are using to real-time compress webcam video into a 150 kbps 
> theora stream?  Are you running Icecast on the same machine?
> Regards,
> John Kintree
>   
Well, it just happens that compressing this video at q5 with Theora 1.1
(SVN) yields a stream that averages around 150kbps.

I've restarted the stream now, by the way, now that I'm back in my
office.  ;)

I'm running Fedora 11 (GNU/Linux) 32-bit on an Intel iMac (I'm not a fan
of Macs, but this was the only hardware available when I returned to work).

The webcam is an Apple built-in iSight USB.  The video is
640x480x15fps.  As I stated before, the compression quality is 5, so
it's not constant bitrate, but variable, but the few spikes are minimal,
and Theora is still handles VBR much better than CBR mode, though 1.1
brought a lot of CBR improvements.

Encoding like this, the Thusnelda encoder takes-up about 60%, on
average, of one of my CPU cores, which is an Intel Core Duo.

IceCast2 is running on one of my servers offsite.  That way, I don't
have to worry about bandwidth, since I've got plenty to spare on my
servers.  My goal is to test this on a much larger scale once I have
something more interesting to stream, perhaps a guest speaker at an
event at a nearby campus, for example.

Anyway, I'm glad this illicited so much interest!  I'm happy to share
and discuss anything else about it.