drfish wrote:Per the discussion on the front page I want to put a little more emphasis on the streaming aspect of the BBQ this year. As nice as it was to talk with FlyingFox and Leor a couple years ago when I did the HatCam thing it was more effort than it looked like and only a couple people used it. This year I'm thinking we go a different route for streaming since it's likely fewer than a dozen or so people will watch anyway, we might as well make it a better experience for them. I'm thinking something along the lines of a Skype group chat or a Google hangout , maybe? I also want to move the camera to different locations or stream more than one view. We can do Livestream again, it was much better last year than previously but it's just so passive and only allows for txt chatting of which there was minimal... The other challenge is that most of the people reading this in this thread are probably coming to the BBQ anyway so how can we bring more attention to the idea and find out what (if anything) people want out of a BBQ steam?
Livestream/Ustream/Justin.tv are nice but like you said they are relatively "passive"
Like I said, much better experience would be to get a proper PoE-powered PTZ cam (for example, from Panasonic) with an optical zoom and use the free DDNS service (for example, Panasonic's own viewnetcam.com) to let others access the cam through browser and control its motion/zoom or maybe even use the "2-way audio" feature (though it might have some issues with some browsers and might require extra equipment like an external speaker/microphone). That doesn't really take a lot of upload bandwidth (you don't need to stream at 1080p especially if the cam won't support it) and is a PERFECT solution for an outdoor cam and you can re-use this cam for some other purposes like video surveillance for your homes (just add a good DVR/NAS and let it constantly record stuff) or whatever.
For indoor stuff - just set up some web cam near some table and just "group call" with other Skype users or Hangout or whatever other client you'll use
Or, if you really have serious issues with upload bandwidth, just make a lot of photos/videos and upload them later to a proper public album at Flickr or similar place
You can do something "fancy" with these, too - for example you can use DJI Phantom's drone and a GoPro cam for making videos (just make sure to have some spare batteries and try to NOT fly it near water, especially during a windy weather).
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