One of the issues I'm slightly concerned about with regards to Gruffydd growing up is that my parents - indeed, most of my family aren't going to see vast sections of this, as they live in Leicester, over 150 miles away. We're doing a lot of stuff with photos, and some stuff with video as well, but the video stuff is merely snapshots.

I've spent today playing around with: o QTSS (Quicktime Streaming Server) o Quicktime Broadcast

Quicktime Broadcast is a funky little bit of software available from Apple for OSX that takes a feed either from an iSight camera, or from a Firewire input. I've rigged up a Canon XM2 to the Firewire port (the same camera that's used for the snapshot videos). Broadcast then has various options for encoding the video and audio - as well as framerate and so on. There's various network options - if your network supports multicast, then there's an option for that. You can also do manual (single) unicast, and automatic unicast. I'm using automatic unicast via the server in London.

The server is running QTSS which compiles quickly and easily on Debian Etch (make sure you've got a qtss user added before you run ./Install otherwise it won't work properly - this doesn't seem to be mentioned in the documentation, but you do get an error whilst it's running saying that the script can't chown some files because the user doesn't exist...)

From here, it's simply a matter of tuning the setup against what you're wanting to do. My parents have been happily watching the stream using Quicktime Player from Leicester, which is what I'd intended. I've tuned our setup to 2fps - the reason for this is it gives the overall best frame quality and audio quality at 320x240. This takes around 28kB/s which is pretty much the size of the upload path over our DSL.

The reason I chose to use the server in London is there's a chance my Grandparents (and obviously, anyone else) will want to watch at the same time as say my parents. The London server obviously has the bandwidth to cope with this. In essence, the London server offers the ability to have more than one client viewing the stream at any one time.

Photos of the setup are here.