Kem Meyer answered a question that we get a lot as well – “How do I stream our services?” She links to posts on how Granger does streaming and audio recording…St. Mark’s has a similar setup with a few differences. Here is how we do streaming and recording:

Cameras: Sony EVI-D100 Pan/Tilt/Zoom and two fixed security cameras
Live Production System: NewTek TriCaster
Video Capture: Pinnacle Dazzle DVC-80 (External Streaming) and an Osprey-100 (Internal Streaming)
Encoding Computers: Sony Vaio PCV-RS420 P4 2.8, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB Hard Drive
Hosting: Basic Dedicated Windows server with 100 Mb connection upgrade at ServerBeach ~ $170/month

Camera Control: RS-232C CAMERA CONTROL SW (Software for controlling PTZ on Sony EVI-D100)
Encoding: Windows Media Encoder 9
Audio Recording: Audacity
Server Software: Windows Media Services 9 Series on Windows Server 2003

Storage: 2 terabyte Infrant ReadyNAS 1000S

Our three cameras and an audio mix feed into the TriCaster which records the video selected video as a high quality AVI file. Note: The TriCaster has streaming capabilities built in but it cannot stream and record simultaneously (Apparently a feature in the new TriCaster Pro). We take S-Video into the Osprey-100 and audio to the sound card to encode a 2137 Kbps stream that we use for internal clients (social hall, gym, nursing room). This is setup as pull and the clients connect directly to the encoder (max 4). We take an RCA video out in the USB Dazzle and audio to the soundcard to encode a 340/109 Kbps stream and a 54/24 Kbps audio only stream which are pushed to a server running Windows Media Services in a data center. With the 100 Mb connection at the data center we have found that we can reliably server at least 150 live streaming clients at this bandwidth without any major loss of quality. We also record audio on the same machine using Audacity and export to MP3 when the recording is finished.

All video and audio recordings are stored on our NAS and backed up to tape. Audio recording are uploaded to Orthodox Sermons. Video archives are not yet available for public access but hopefully will be available soon.

We also are looking forward to working with other streaming technologies such as Flash and QuickTime but haven’t found the time to evaluate them yet.

If you have any questions about our setup or would like any part of it explained in more detail, please comment here.