Fun with Video

Adding live video to your Web

What if you want others to view your video conference? For example, if there’s a discussion between eminent people and you want others to see it. The answer will lie in video streaming,popular for watching online video shows. 

For this, you will need a regular webcam, a PC and software to encode and output the video to a stream. This stream will then need to be made accessible from a Web page. For this, set up a webcam and use Microsoft’s NetShow encoder to encode the live video. NetShow can be freely downloaded from Microsoft’s website. Though, it’s a precursor to the more recent and better MS Windows Media Encoder, the sheer simplicity and quick configuration of NetShow encoder is lucrative to rig up a quick stream source. It’s capable of streaming over HTTP on a specified port. With an appropriate template chosen for your stream (depending on the bandwidth you and your viewers have and also the quality of audio/video that you want), you can start the NetShow server to pump out the video data stream to the network or the Internet. You will need to have a static IP on the Internet for the stream to be accessible from the outside world. Alternatively, if your Web host provides video streaming services, you can connect to his streaming server to serve your video. For this, modify your webpage code to point to the web host’s server and port. Next, you need to embed the Windows Media Player component on your webpage. This can be done in HTML as follows. 

Live video feed from my web cam

 





Now start your webcam and point at anything you want to show on the web. 




Note: 203.122.29.12 and 1263 need to be substituted with your server’s IP and port respectively.

Ankur Saxena