Pada
Executive Member
We're using VLC to capture and stream (broadcast) our church services over a VPN.
We are having issues with our audio quality, because VLC is capturing the video and audio with Windows' DirectShow filter which takes both the audio and video feed from the camera (connected via firewire). For some odd reason the audio quality is rather poor that we get from the Sony HVR-V1E camera has an audio feed directly from the sound desk with an XLR cable. I've really tried many times to pick the sound card as the audio source, but VLC / DirectShow refused to take the audio from another source!
I also thought the video quality that we got over firewire was quite pixellated in comparison with what the camera delivered on our screen via composite out.
I then went and bought a BlackMagic Intensity Shuttle USB 3 video capture device, because thought that would give me better video quality via composite and also allow me to feed the audio from a separate feed.
I first tried it with my office PC's Asus P7H55D-M Evo, which was a complete disaster, seeing that it has a NEC USB 3 chipset which is incompatible with the Intensity Shuttle. So from the get-go I was quite disappointed with the Intensity Shuttle, because it had no backwards compatibility with USB 2 either due to its power requirements.
I then bought a Vantec USB 3 PCI-E card and then the Intensity Shuttle worked! VLC was able to play the video from the Intensity Shuttle and the audio from our sound card, BUT for the life of me I couldn't get VLC to stream it like that! As soon as I chose Stream (and not Play), it just ignored my audio selection.
I've also tried various other streaming applications and servers (such as Unreal Media, Adobe Flash Media Encoder) , but they were either too expensive or too complicated to setup for streaming over a local network.
Then this past week I've made a breakthrough with FFmpeg!
FFmpeg allowed me to open 2 DirectShow filters: 1 for the video via firewire and another one for audio via the sound card.
The video filtering and encoding/transcoding options in FFmpeg are just so much better too.
So now I'm using FFmpeg to capture and transcode it into a MPEG-TS file in my temp folder, and then I use VLC to just broadcast (without transcoding) the file over HTTP. The audio that I received like this tonight was much clearer and didn't contain disruptive noises any longer.
Now all that is left for me is to test the stability/reliability of FFmpeg, which I trust is great!
If anyone is interested in my command-line options/scripts, I'd be happy to share it
We are having issues with our audio quality, because VLC is capturing the video and audio with Windows' DirectShow filter which takes both the audio and video feed from the camera (connected via firewire). For some odd reason the audio quality is rather poor that we get from the Sony HVR-V1E camera has an audio feed directly from the sound desk with an XLR cable. I've really tried many times to pick the sound card as the audio source, but VLC / DirectShow refused to take the audio from another source!
I also thought the video quality that we got over firewire was quite pixellated in comparison with what the camera delivered on our screen via composite out.
I then went and bought a BlackMagic Intensity Shuttle USB 3 video capture device, because thought that would give me better video quality via composite and also allow me to feed the audio from a separate feed.
I first tried it with my office PC's Asus P7H55D-M Evo, which was a complete disaster, seeing that it has a NEC USB 3 chipset which is incompatible with the Intensity Shuttle. So from the get-go I was quite disappointed with the Intensity Shuttle, because it had no backwards compatibility with USB 2 either due to its power requirements.
I then bought a Vantec USB 3 PCI-E card and then the Intensity Shuttle worked! VLC was able to play the video from the Intensity Shuttle and the audio from our sound card, BUT for the life of me I couldn't get VLC to stream it like that! As soon as I chose Stream (and not Play), it just ignored my audio selection.
I've also tried various other streaming applications and servers (such as Unreal Media, Adobe Flash Media Encoder) , but they were either too expensive or too complicated to setup for streaming over a local network.
Then this past week I've made a breakthrough with FFmpeg!
FFmpeg allowed me to open 2 DirectShow filters: 1 for the video via firewire and another one for audio via the sound card.
The video filtering and encoding/transcoding options in FFmpeg are just so much better too.
So now I'm using FFmpeg to capture and transcode it into a MPEG-TS file in my temp folder, and then I use VLC to just broadcast (without transcoding) the file over HTTP. The audio that I received like this tonight was much clearer and didn't contain disruptive noises any longer.
Now all that is left for me is to test the stability/reliability of FFmpeg, which I trust is great!
If anyone is interested in my command-line options/scripts, I'd be happy to share it