TRR Stream

 Hey everyone!
  Some of you may have known that I was in Austin Texas, streaming Texas Robot Roundup last weekend. It was another fun road trip with Paul, and it actually went incredibly well!

Click on to see how we did it!

Teaser!! Here's Paul's GTI stuffed full of webcast gear!

Iphone Audio Cable

Here's the quick and dirty iPhone audio interface that I whipped up today. It plugs into the headphones port on an iPhone or similar phone that uses a TRRS for mic and speaker, and sends the headphone out of the phone to a stereo channel on the mixer, and balances a line level output from the mixer and matches it to the mic level input of the iPhone. I will use this cable to take calls during live shows.

The trick is to making something like this work is getting audio back into the phone, its extremely simple just plug the left and right channels of the headphone output into the mixer, but convincing the powered microphone input to take a line level signal is a bit trickier. We'll make the conversion using two resistors, check out the diagram after the break.

Roll24:LIVE

We'll be running video for the Texas Robot Roundup in Austin in one week, and I've pulled out all the stops on this one, its now or never folks!

Things are a little hectic right now with the preparations, but I know we will be live all day Friday and Saturday, and hopefully I can bang  out a behind the scenes post soon after!

Wireless HD Video

I've been experimenting with a new toy recently, and I must say I'm very excited at the opportunities it opens up for my business. As you can probably guess from the title (and also the picture above of me streaming from a borrowed Panasonic Lumix to my MacBook) that what I have been experimenting with is a way to get HD from a floor camera back to my laptop wirelessly.

Enter the Teradek CUBE,

The cube 220 is a network video encoder, capable of generating a unicast video stream in many flavors (from 480i all the way through 1080p) and broadcasting it over wifi or ethernet. This is very cool tech, because it brings capabilities previously reserved for production companies with access to HD-SDI Transmitters costing tens of thousands of dollars and operating using large batteries and and large amounts of licensed bandwidth.

Today, small start-ups, such as our very own Roll 24 Productions, can broadcast full HD wirelessly from light weight, ENG cameras with only several thousand invested. Naturally its not that easy, it would be that easy if the tech would just stop changing for a darn minute, but I'll complain about that some other time.

At any rate, you've probably gathered  by now that I've gotten my hands on a Teradek Cube, and last week Nick and I took over a booth at the local Diner to try and get it up and running.

As you can see I'm very excited. This equipment represents  large leap forward for my business. All I can tell you right now is that this thing is tiny, light on weight and light on power. It also works, and now that I have it configured its simple to bump video from anything that has a HDMI output to my laptop. you can look forward to a full technical breakdown sometime in the future, once I get my hands on a camera other than Nick's Lumix to test with, and develop a battery solution that is held together with a woodworking clamp.