Question / Help In House Broadcast

[Nick Weaver]

I'm sorry If this has been asked and answered before, I've done some searching and haven't found a good answer.

What I want to do is a high quality intranetwork stream (IE not to the internet at large, just devices on the network). I don't care about broadcast to the internet at large, just about quality. I'm not really sensitive to price, and am willing to shell out some good money to get this done right.

I want to stream all of my audio/video devices from just one rack in the house. I am setting up a 10Gbase-T network and should be able to handle all reasonable broadcasts (for now at least, 4K is a whole other beast). I need to combine a high quality video capture stream and a high quality audio capture stream. For this I have looked into quite a few capture options and think that it can be done with many dedicated 1080P video capture cards (I've found a few that look promising). But I am stumped on audio capture, especially because I want to maintain the full HD audio (dts-hd, true-hd are desired, but not required, but 5.1 ac3 and dts are required, as many devices simply output this at present. I would prefer to not have a receiver in the mix to convert to spdif, but that is always an option). For right now i'm not concerned with HDCP, so please try and leave that out. There are numerous workarounds. I think maybe the asus Xonar could handle the audio stream, but am not sure. I was thinking that open broadcaster could mux the two streams together and then an rtmp server could broadcast it, but I'm also not sure this is the right approach in general. I was hoping that you all could offer some advice here.

Would Open broadcaster and a good video capture with the Xonar be able to handle a high quality stream? What would the latency be like? I don't need/want re-encoding from open-braodcaster, just muxing as the video capture card can do the encoding, which doesn't seem like it should be a processor intensive task.

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

-Nick

 

[Boildown]

I don't think OBS is even close to being designed to do what you want it to do, nor do I think you can configure it within some other system to do it either. The only Asus Xonar I know of is the Xonar Phoebus, and I used to use one, I don't know of anything about it that makes it special over other sound cards in any way that can help you on this... quest. You're way out on the bleeding edge here, and most of what you're talking about no one has ever tried, or you should look into getting some industrial solution. If you do manage to get this working, you should post back here and let us know what you did.

I'm made more dubious of your ability to plan and execute your plan with your reference to 10G... you do realize how much more bandwidth that is than a few video streams, right?

 

[Jack0r]

Well, OBS can be used for some parts of what you are planning, but I currently know of no way to capture 5.1 and send it with an rtmp stream. It would be converted to stereo before send over. Then, some capture cards might offer a hardware encoder, but currently these cannot be used with OBS. Quicksync, nvenc or soon amdvce could be used if you dont have enough CPU power to do the rough encoding though.
In short, with OBS you can create a video stream with stereo audio at pretty much any quality and resolution you want. Then you will need a media server, nginx+rtmp module, wowza or flash media server, to do the server work. And finally find a playback solution that works in all places where you want to watch the stream. Latency will be about 3-5 seconds on nginx and mostly standard settings.

 

[Nick Weaver]

It isn't? rats. Are there any utilities that can do something like this? The only other way i've heard to have something even similar costs in excess of $100,000. I don't want to spend that and figured this was close enough to be workable. vlc has a multicast streaming option that may be close, I will do some more research there. Thanks for the input.

10G is about latency. There are numerous ways to reduce latency, but actually getting the network out of the way requires kernel bypass. That is only available (at present) on 10G SFP cards. There is also some concern about future proof. Uncompressed 1080P is about 2.970 Gbit/sec, Uncompressed 4K bandwidth on the other hand can exceed 6Gbps : http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/logi...re.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4445944
Now I'm not saying I want to transmit uncompressed (that would really be tough), but it isn't exactly super expensive to try and handle it. 10GBase-T switches can be had for $800. That's no longer a project killer. Plus if this works, then I could probably also handle 4K, if I could ever find a capture card that could handle it.

 

[Nick Weaver]

Thanks for the thoughts Jack0r. It sounds like I will have to continue my search then. There are a lot of offerings for video, but hd audio has been left to the wayside for some reason.

 

[Nick Weaver]

Well, OBS can be used for some parts of what you are planning, but I currently know of no way to capture 5.1 and send it with an rtmp stream. It would be converted to stereo before send over. Then, some capture cards might offer a hardware encoder, but currently these cannot be used with OBS. Quicksync, nvenc or soon amdvce could be used if you dont have enough CPU power to do the rough encoding though.
In short, with OBS you can create a video stream with stereo audio at pretty much any quality and resolution you want. Then you will need a media server, nginx+rtmp module, wowza or flash media server, to do the server work. And finally find a playback solution that works in all places where you want to watch the stream. Latency will be about 3-5 seconds on nginx and mostly standard settings.

Just thought of this, what about 8 channel LPCM. It's bandwidth heavy, but not encoded. Then all it would need is a decoder essentially.