Murphy Mac

Murphy’s going to demonstrate how to broadcast live video from your Mac. Quicktime Broadcaster is easy to set up, yet you can use it to serve large numbers of clients simultaneously.

You can keep things simple: Connect a camera to a computer running Quicktime Broadcaster. A client computer can connect and see your live video feed using the Quicktime Player on a Mac or Windows machine.

In multicast mode multiple computers can connect to your live video. Your network must support multicasting for this to work.

If your network doesn’t support multicasting you can use the Quicktime Streaming Server or free Darwin Streaming Server. The streaming server gets the video feed from your computer running Quicktime Broadcaster and redistributes, or reflects, a stream to the clients.

Here’s a scenario:

You need to broadcast a meeting from the conference room. (or the dorm room) A couple hundred clients will be watching with Quicktime Player.

Your Darwin Streaming Server is located in a rack in some back room.  Install Quicktime Broadcaster on a laptop in the conference room. Connect your camera. The Darwin server gets the feed from the laptop. Then the clients all connect to the Darwin server to get the live feed.

Again - it’s possible to have the clients connect directly to the computer running Quicktime Broadcaster, as long as the network supports multicasting.

In the screencast Murphy will show you how to set up the broadcast feed. Set your preferences and export them to a Quicktime file you can distribute to your viewers over the web or in an email. Opening the Quicktime file connects the users to the live broadcast. You can create multiple files for different bit rates. You’ve probably seen web sites with choices like this.
Check back for a screencast on using the Darwin Streaming Server.

Bonus: Darwin Streaming Server and Quicktime Broadcaster are both free. And you don’t need Quicktime Pro.

Skinning your Quicktime files is a great way to make them jump off the screen. Especially now that video has become commonplace on web sites all over the Internet.

The screencast will show you how to make a skin just like this video has.

A lot of people have been frustrated trying to make this work. The steps Apple describes in their tutorial are somewhat vague.

The bad news: You’ll need Quicktime Pro if you want to take a stab at this. But that’s not so bad. If you’re someone who plays around with video, posts video on the web, edits video - whatever - you want to have Quicktime Pro. It’s extremely powerful, and handy to have for all sorts of chores.

You can download the files Murphy uses in the screencast and try the steps yourself. Or take a look at the completed output.

If you’re lost check with Quicktime Kirk on Apple Discussions, or check his website. He’s extremely helpful and has information on skins.