Question / Help Streaming project feasibility

[braaibander]

Hey there,

I have a little project I'm working on for an art festival for which I could use a bit of help with determining the feasibility and limitations of the idea, and generally seeing if you have any further tips for me. I'm still quite early on in the process and not particularly experienced in streaming technologies, but OBS looks like it would be able to do the job.

So the idea is to continuously stream the webcam and mic from two laptops to each other. This means that PC1 is showing the webcam and audio of PC2 on its screen, while PC2 shows the video and audio of PC1 in the meanwhile. Because there won't be a stable internet connection on the festival site, I will be connecting these PCs through a dedicated WLAN network, so while there will be plenty of bandwidth, it will have to work without any internet connectivity.

A more ambitious plan is to add in a 3rd PC that will show the video and audio of both PC1 and PC2 but doesn't need to stream any video itself. If possible it should be able to stream its own audio to both PC 1 and PC2.

As I said, I'm still in the early stages of figuring this all out, so any help or thoughts are appreciated, but I'm mostly interested in answers to the following questions:
1. Is this a feasible idea? And what difficulties do you guys foresee?
2. What kind of hardware will I need? Do I need a dedicated video card or rather a specifically powerful CPU? Will it run on some older laptops?
3. How stable can I expect this to be? Will I be able to run it for a whole day uninterrupted? Or even several days?

Any help is appreciated :)

 

[Narcogen]

1) Yes, feasible, within limits.
2) Depends on intended resolution and framerate. Expected latency is also relevant. Do you expect these people to be able to interact with one another in realtime, as if using Skype, but just without internet? Dedicated GPU always good for rendering, can be useful for encoding depending on your expected bitrate needs.
3) Depends largely on network characteristics-- location, power, number of served clients, environment.

 

[braaibander]

It is indeed a bit of a Skype-experience I'm looking for (couldn't find any chat software that works over LAN though), so the resolution and framerate don't have to be too high, but higher off course is better, but latency is probably most important to keep down.

The thing is that I don't really know what is feasible with limited hardware; I don't know the general dimensions involved.
For instance, if I want to stream a 720p 30fps video while rendering a similar stream on for instance a 4-year-old Core i5, will it be struggling to keep up? Or will it generally have no problem at all doing that?

Considering the stability: it will in general be 1 (or 2 in case of the 3PC setup) served clients per PC (so 2 streams with both 1 or 2 clients) which will go over a dedicated network. These 2 or 3 devices will be the only ones on a network connected by directional 450mb antennas which should have a range up to 1000 meters where in practice, the greatest distance won't be more than 300 or 400 meters, so hopefully, that will give me a stable connection.
Off course I probably should expect the connection to drop out at some point, so that does make me wonder about how well these streams handle this. Will they easily and automatically reconnect?

 

[Narcogen]

OBS does not really have a built-in mechanism for attempting to re-establish connections except when communicating with an RTMP server (like YouTube, Twitch, or Mixer). You can set up your own, but if the end client is a web browser you'll get significant latency; getting it as low as a couple of seconds can be problematic.

Look at Rocket.chat. OBS is not made for this; you'd need additional software to use OBS to do this anyway, so it's better to use something intended for videochat. Choose the "install my own server" option.