Wireless Video Camera for Livecasting

[nathan]

I'm looking at doing some live casting to youtube live without it costing the earth. I'm after a wireless camera of decent quality (720p max) that is also battery powered and can interface with Open Broadcaster Software.

 

Price wise im looking at hundreds instead of thousands.

 

Has anyone had any experience of this?

Edited January 7, 2016 by nathan

[VeryPC_Anthony_L]

Hi @nathan

 

By wireless do you mean using wifi or a camera with a wireless adapter that outputs to HDMI etc

 

Anthony

[nathan]

Hi,

 

i mean using WIFI.

 

So a PC with the main software on, then roaming wifi cameras.

[VeryPC_Anthony_L]

Having had a look at open broadcaster I think you will find this very hard to achieve as the software requires either a capture card or usb webcam.

 

Direct Show Video Capture - Open Broadcaster Software - Help Files

[bald_pig]

OBS supports video streams, so you could use it that way?

 

I know the Xiaomi Yi can be used to stream live video at 640x480 with a little tweaking?

[dry]

Yeah that sounds fairly hard to achieve without a laptop connected to the camera whilst roaming. If you look on the LinusTechTips Youtube channel, they did a video very recently about a portable broadcasting setup. He had a laptop in his backpack which received video from the professional camera via HDMI cable going into the backpack. The laptop then processed the video and streamed it live via 4G to the internet.

 

It was more of a test-of-theory instead of a proper solution, but proves that it can be done. Limitations were battery life of laptop and reliability of 4G. Obviously you won't be relying on a cellular connection but would still be affected by battery life. Also you'd need to ensure your WiFi (both locally and WAN connection) is capable in terms of handing off between APs and uplink speed.

[VeryPC_Anthony_L]

From what I can tell OBS supports streaming out of the software but not into the software.

Any cameras or inputs though would need to be connected directly to the computer running OBS.

 

Streaming from OBS would then need to be done through an internet connection which could be hardwired, wireless or even 4G.

[bald_pig]

Nope, you can add a stream as a video source, tried myself last night.

[ijk]

(Oops, not battery powered unless with this sort of addition).

(Double Oops, no audio! Although there is this: https://github.com/iizukanao/picam).

 

What about a Raspberry Pi with the camera module (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/camera.md) and UV4L (Linux Projects - News), which delivers a stream. I set one up to monitor an aquarium and while I can't get the stream to display correctly in many browsers, it does deilver one. This page (Linux Projects - Documentation) lists the encoding options.

Edited January 12, 2016 by ijk