Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Mon Oct 24, 2016 3:04 pm

I have a desire to broadcast the action at a local robotics tournament from one room to another in the same school. My current idea is to get a cheap tablet or phone (without service) and use either Meerkat or Periscope to stream the action over wifi and then have a separate computer in the other room attached to a projector viewing the feed (Periscope allows any browser to see the feeds - I don't know about Meerkat).

Has anyone done such a thing? Is there some obvious method that I'm missing? The distance is too far to just run wires down the hallway. Do any of the cheap Android tablets have a decent camera? BTW, the solution has to be fairly inexpensive. We're running the tournament partially as a fund raiser. Anything more than $200 would defeat the purpose of the event.

gilraen · Post by **gilraen** » Mon Oct 24, 2016 4:02 pm

Periscope captures pretty decent video and audio quality, obviously the better the camera on your phone, the better, but it shouldn't require anything fancy. You probably don't want to use a giant projection screen, though, since resolution will be okay to watch on the tablet or laptop screen or even larger monitor, but it will be too blurry if blown up too much.

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Mon Oct 24, 2016 5:01 pm

That might be a problem. The gym with all the action is to small to hold everyone so we're going to have to put it on a big screen in the cafeteria.

gilraen · Post by **gilraen** » Mon Oct 24, 2016 5:23 pm

The internet seems to think that your wi-fi connection is more important than even the quality of the camera on your phone. You may have a bigger problem if you're using the school's open wi-fi along with 200 other people.

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Mon Oct 24, 2016 6:50 pm

That's not a worry. The school network isn't open. We should be almost the only thing using it.

gameoverman · Post by **gameoverman** » Fri Oct 28, 2016 3:35 pm

I would definitely work backwards from the display. Is there a way for you to test the projector, to display some test images in different resolutions? This way you, and anyone else who wants to do something like this at the school, will know what they require by way of camera.

Kasey Chang · Post by **Kasey Chang** » Mon Oct 31, 2016 12:38 am

Can you use OBS? https://obsproject.com/

LawBeefaroni · Post by **LawBeefaroni** » Mon Oct 31, 2016 9:34 am

Madmarcus wrote:BTW, the solution has to be fairly inexpensive. We're running the tournament partially as a fund raiser. Anything more than $200 would defeat the purpose of the event.

Surely someone involved has a decent phone or tablet they can lend for use at the event.

Victoria Raverna · Post by **Victoria Raverna** » Tue Nov 01, 2016 9:54 pm

Use a chromecast dongle and a cheap android phone with good camera?

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Wed Nov 02, 2016 6:19 am

Right now I'm trying out the Periscope on a cheap tablet with the computer disobeying things from the Periscope website. Mostly it's failing (no video from the website no matter which feeds I look at) but I'm still trying to figure out the cause

Octopus Overlords

Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap

Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap

Re: Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap

Re: Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap

Re: Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap

Re: Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap

Re: Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap

Re: Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap

Re: Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap

Re: Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap

Re: Broadcasting, sort of, on the cheap