Guest blogger Seb Lee-Delisle shares his experience broadcasting a remote FlashBrighton session using Influxis TVStation
We’ve been testing out the new TVStation beta from Influxis to broadcast our weekly FlashBrighton meetings. Most meetings are just streams from our webcam, broadcast into the application – all very straightforward, and you can see the recordings here (click on MEDIA to see the on demand content).
It’s a bit of extra effort but we don’t mind – we’re very lucky in Brighton UK to have a thriving digital media scene so we’re happy to share 
On the air
We started off encoding within TVStation itself, but this uses Flash Player’s own rather ugly H.263 encoder, I assume built to be processor friendly rather than high quality. Don’t get me wrong – it’s very cool that Flash has this built in and it’s good enough for things like chat roulette (let’s face it, some things you don’t want in too much resolution), but we wanted something a little nicer.
And thankfully we found it! In the snappily titled Flash Media Live Encoder, or FMLE. It’s a free download, currently only available on Windows but an OSX version is coming soon. It takes your camera and turns it into a high quality stream that can broadcast straight to FMS. In other words, it sends the feed into TVStation. The quality is really really good. Compare the Aral Balkan presentation with some of the more recent ones and you’ll see the difference.
Broadcast your screen
So that’s all fine and easy for simple presentations, but what about if we want to broadcast the screen like in David Arno’s presentation? Well there are a couple of simple apps you can download that turn your screen into a webcam.
The one we use is for the Mac and it’s free – CamTwist – which is actually designed to add weird effects to your camera but we ignore all of that cheezy stuff and just use the desktop feature. To get the best quality, increase the size of the camera in CamTwist’s preferences to match the screen size, we find that 1024 x 768 works well.
As David was using a PC he couldn’t use CamTwist, instead he used ScreenCamera, which is $49 but seemed to work well.
Hooking into Skype
So that’s what we’ve discovered so far, but when we decided to have Branden Hall present remotely from Washington DC to our meeting in Brighton, the technology got a little fiddlier! We knew we could have a Skype conversation with Branden, and then he could use Skype’s screen sharing capabilities.
We then use CamTwist to share my entire screen, including Skype. All good so far! Except that you have to specify a microphone for FMLE to use. In my tests at home, I found that my microphone seemed to pick up both myself and the sound from the other end of Skype which was fine.
But I was worried – at the meeting we’d be playing the sound through large speakers and I thought that there may be some echo for Branden. So I plugged in an external piezo microphone into an external M-Audio sound card and placed it near the speakers.
This microphone is what FMLE was broadcasting, but Skype was using my internal microphone. The speakers were pretty loud so I’m thinking that Skype has got pretty damn clever at reducing the echo!
TIP: Set up a new Skype account just for this purpose – otherwise notifications will pop up as your contacts come on and offline!
Hack-tastic!
So this is how we did it. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t slick. There’s a hell of a lot of re-encoding going on. And the audio from Branden was decoded, converted into audio, picked up by a mic and then converted back to digital again. And then re-encoded! But it worked and is surprisingly good quality.
We’re looking at ways to do this a little more elegantly, and I’m in collaboration with Influxis to create some new tools that may help us to manage all our streams more efficiently.
Watch this space
Seb Lee-Delisle is an expert in Flash 3D, games and physics. He is the CTO at BAFTA winning digital agency Plug-in Media, a member of the Papervision3D team, and manages user group FlashBrighton.
[...] Streaming a remote presentation with TVStation [...]