[Coco] CoCoFest weblink and chat availability

[Roger Taylor]

At 04:00 PM 4/24/2006, you wrote:
>  replies:
>
>Good on ya Roger.
>Why is it that every year the idea of setting up a chat link or webcam at 
>the fest happens in the last remaining days of the fest?


Good question.  If they're anything like me they wait til the last minute 
for everything.  :)  I think also unless they've had experience running a 
simple FTP webcam that it might seem like something too complex to do.

I have several web site clients running 24/7 webcams, one for several years 
now and one for over a year, so I have experience in this area although I 
don't claim to be an expert.  One of my cams is streaming to a rebroadcast 
server that requires an ActiveX control/program to be downloaded by the 
browser to download and view the stream.  The image appears in the web page 
like any other image.  Another cam is using the CoffeeCup WebCam software 
to FTP the images to the client's web site every 20 seconds.  The web 
site's cam page knows how to refresh the image without refreshing the whole 
page, using JavaScript.  It's a rather simple concept.

Ofcourse, some type of video capture device has to be used along with the 
webcam.  For laptops, a USB video capture "card" or unit works great.  It's 
just a little box with a USB plug on one end and a few RCA jacks on the 
other end.  Most have audio capabilities, but that will probably require 
Windows Media Encoder or some other stream creater.  WME is free.  If this 
person decides to use WME, I will try to figure out a way to serve the 
stream to many viewers at one time through a server I have access to.  I 
can't make any promises there, though.  I would much rather somebody else 
offer a streaming server for the weekend that we can tell WME to stream to 
and then I can tell CoCo3.com to tell your web browser to view that 
stream.  :)  If somebody is setting up an account like this I would guess 
that 100 viewers at a time would be more than enough, but I don't know?


-- 
Roger Taylor