Apr 27 2009
Peer-to-peer broadcasting over iChat AV
Bill Douthett (Digital Bill of Wizards
of Technology fame) and I are big fans of film director Kevin
Smith and his Jersey Trilogy. When news hit recently that Smith would be
appearing in a 3 episode story arc of “Degrassi:
The Next Generation”, I was stoked. But, Bill…not so much.
“WTF is ‘Degrassi’?”
Degrassi in its various forms is a curious Canadian television phenomenon that
was a favorite of Kevin Smith’s while he worked as a clerk at the Red Bank,
New Jersey Quik Stop he later made famous. He also made reference to Degrassi
in nearly every one of his films. You’d think a show given that kind of attention
would be more famous but it isn’t even all that big here in Canada, and even
less so in Fort Lauderdale, FL where Bill lives. It does broadcast there but
on the N and on a delay
of several weeks…and who wants to wait weeks to see Jay and Silent Bob battle
Canadian Ninjas? Not Bill, I can tell you that.
The solution involves iChat
AV, an ADS
Tech Pyro A/V Link analog to digital converter (from here on referred to
as “the Pyro”), two broadband connections (for the sender and the
receiver) and little else. I connected the video and right and left audio out
from my VCR to the video and right and left audio in on the Pyro. Next, I set
the Pyro to Analog Mode and stretched a Firewire cable from it to the Firewire
port on the Mac. I then simply logged into iChat AV and specified the Pyro as
both my”camera” and my “microphone” in the Video pane of
iChat’s Preferences and, bikkity-bam, I was broadcasting whatever played
on my VCR over iChat AV. If you attempt this yourself, you may also need to
set iChat’s Bandwidth Limit to about 200Kbps, so you don’t overrun the person
on the receiving end (never a bad idea when video chatting over DSL or other
bandwidth-limiting connections).
When
Monday night rolled around, I just emailed Bill in the morning to let him know
that at 8:30pm PST he should be on iChat awaiting an invition for a One-Way
Video Chat and that was that. When the show was about to air, I selected Bill’s
iChat screenname and sent the invitation via the Buddies menu. Once he accepted
he was able to watch the episode “virtually live.” There were a few
problems with the signal dropping off, but if the person on the sending end
of the rig keeps a close eye on the preview window, it is easy to see when trouble
occurs and simply re-invite the receiver.
After the show was over, we found that this method also worked for broadcasting
VHS video cassettes and even DVDs. Granted, the video is heavily compressed,
but if you just want to get the idea across and share a movie with a friend
online, this is a pretty cool way to do it.
