Well, we did it… Sorta… Last night at The Temecula Wine and Beer Garden (I kept getting it backwards by putting Beer first in previous posts, guess it’s just a personal preference:b) we fired up our Mogulus Channel and attempted our first live Internet feed of a Trunkmonkey performance. What follows is the blow by blow…

So, the initial idea was to borrow a WiFi enabled laptop, slap a camera on it and just let it rip. With the right equipment, it really is that easy… with the right equipment. I have a Panasonic PVGS320 with a screwed up tape carriage that makes for an excellent web cam connected to a Mac via firewire. Much to my disgust, the same can’t be said of a USB 2.0 connection made to a Windows box… I discovered this maybe two hours before show time. So fucking typical that the only way this camera will communicate via USB 2 with Windows is through some bullshit Microsoft movie editing software you have to buy. Piss on them, and that. Still determined to use the laptop, I abandoned the PVGS320 for my HVX200 to see if that would make things any easier. It didn’t. I mean, I don’t know, I never tried to use the HVX200 as a web cam and I don’t know that it even has that capability but I had to at least try. Since I didn’t have time to do any reading I just fired everything up and hoped for some “plug ‘n play” love. The machine recognized the P2 cards in the camera as removable discs but that was about it. Shit…

Not wanting to have to explain another abandoned live feed attempt (like last week) I simply bit the bullet and decided to go with what I knew worked. I took my freakin’ iMac to the gig and set it up behind a hot dog counter and wired the 320 to it. My iMac picked up on Old Town’s WiFi immediately (Macs rule by the way… And I was born wired to a PC) and a quick network test claimed we had 570kbps on the upload. Mogulus recommends a minimum 400kbps so it was lookin pretty good. Unfortunately, it was too close to go time to get logged in and cue up the mogulus/meetube studio so I just had to wait until the first break to actually start web casting.

We played a set, as soon as the break came I went back to work on the computer. I logged in and cued everything up and at 8:33PM we went live for the first time! It was exciting to see everything actually working the way it was supposed to. Or at least so it appeared…

For some reason, the Mogulus software defaults to what it calls the “built in mic” (the computer) for audio when you hook up a web cam. I wanted to use the mic in my PVGS320 (the camera) because the mic in the computer is shitty and the computer was sitting behind a hot dog cart. Anyway, I didn’t realize the audio had to be set manually until the second break. Our team of viewers we had strategically located throughout the country were armed with their cell phones and the calls came in… They all were saying the same thing, “We see you guys, but we can’t hear anything…” Shit…

Okay, third set’s a charm, right? Well, not exactly… Apparently once the audio situation was corrected, it became obvious that there was considerable lag time from camera to cyberspace… After the third set when I went to look at the computer, I still saw myself on stage in the monitor… Huh??? What’s going on here? Sadly, I don’t have an answer… After a few phone calls we kept getting the same report, the audio sounded good but the video stuttered tremendously. The only thing I can guess is that the connection simply wasn’t holding steady at the 570kbps it tested out at.

Based on the fact that I’ve done short web casts from my living room that worked pretty darn good (with my machine hard wired to the network) I can only assume that WiFi is the issue. I’ve also read up on some of the issues with the current build of Mozilla Fire Fox leaking memory when processing video; next time, a different browser.

So that’s it I guess… Kinda disappointing considering all the effort but, at least now I think I have a firm grasp on what doesn’t work. Live Beta 2, the sequel will be in another couple weeks. The next test will be in a situation where we’re hard wired and I’ll probably run Safari just to see if it makes any difference. It will be great if it works out but I can’t help but feel that this “technology” won’t be all that it can be until you can whip out your laptop and “go live” on a moments notice the way the girl does on the Mogulus video. Our first experience in the field was that it just doesn’t quite work that way, yet…