[power142]

Does anyone know of a software package, commerical or otherwise, which will allow me to stream good quality live video across a 100Mbit network?

I've tried Quicktime Broadcaster with a Canopus ADVC-100 (firewire, DV input to the Mac) and it can't deal with 640x480 @ 30fps with any codec I've tried (preinstalled + 3ivx 4.5) running on a Power Mac G4 dual 1.42GHz/1.5GB RAM. If I drop to 480x360, it'll manage mid-20s, but I have to lower it to 320x480 to get 30fps. Motion JPEG-A/B are quiet effective, but still not 30fps on the high quality setting. I'm assuming something is afoot because when I use high quality settings it won't max out the processors (neither reach anything close to 100%).

Is something wrong with this setup or do I need a G5?

For those who are interested, I want to stream video to my Powerbook from anywhere in the house without having to deal with Apple's MPEG-4 quality.....

[Mastrap]

Trying to stream video at 30fps at 640x480 will always get you into trouble.
That's just an insane amount of data you're trying to shove through a network that isn't designed to cope with it.

[power142]

The network has plenty of capacity - 100Mbps between a handful of machines. The reason I want to compress the data for streaming is so that lesser machines (namely, my Powerbook) can cope with the network throughput and actually decode the video without choking.

I've subsequently seen an artical on http://www.3ivx.com where they compare the DiVA encode speed on a dual 2.0 G5 with other algorithms, and they get a little under 50fps with that hardware... maybe my dual G4 just isn't up to the task

[ckohler]

Mastrap is right, 640x480 30fps is outragiously huge. I've done a lot of live audio/video streaming and you just can't get that kind of performance reliably out of consumer or pro-sumer grade computers both on the encoding and decoding end.

You should plan on maxing your video encoding to 320x240 pixels and just using a nice high bitrate. That will enough to allow the end computer to double size or full-screen the video in software reducing CPU overhead on both the encoder and playback machine.