For several legitimate reasons I have occasionally got the need to push a video ustream, one of which is the Giants Live webcast which is our live game night broadcast and DVD shop for the Belfast Giants.
Now that the plug is over, back to the topic.
Pushing Video or Music Files to Ustream
It’s really quite easy. As most of you (5,6?) know uStream is an on-demand free web broadcasting solution which takes the usability of youtube and makes it live. One thing it isn’t made to do is broadcast ‘content’ just live material.
It is however fairly simple to spoof uStream into thinking it is receiving a webcam and a microphone respectively for vision and sound. Two simple applications are all you need: CamTwist and SoundFlower. CamTwist manages videos, slide shows, flickr sets and desktop views into a pretend webcam which uStream automatically picks up as an option. Soundflower is an Audio Driver which presents itself as an output option for your sound applications, and an input device for uStream to recieve from.
So to play a movie file (your own or non-copyrighted content of course) open it up in CamTwist and it will probably play automatically. Choose ‘SoundFlower 2ch’ as your output device in ‘Sounds’ and away you go. Broadcast your uStream channel and the two apps should appear as Sound/Video options.
Voilà.
Oh, and it’s my birthday tomorrow. Possibly going to the empire for Blues/Jazz some night this week as an ‘event.’