I know there are already two threads relating to the streaming but they are a bit out of date.

Basically I wanted to apologise and explain about the downfall of the service in recent months.

First thing you've got to realise is that it is quite tricky to do the streaming itself, especially without dedicated hardware, the two pc's I use are normally for normal day to day use, in an ideal world I would have a whole pc dedicated to streaming, but financially this is not possible.

Setting up two pc's for streaming, then actually getting it running and monitoring it for a typical race day takes about 6 hours in total.

Regarding quailty - the current system doesn't allow for high quality, the main factor is upload speed, I am currently getting about 300k upload, and when you consider each second of stream (that is 25 frames and 16 bit audio per second) has to be compressed to less than 300k you can imagine the sacrifice needed in video and audio quality.

While the visual quality has improved, the sound has worsened, I am totally confused as to why and have investigated every possible setting to find the problem, the only thing left is to reinstall Windows, and I might have to do that.

I came up with the idea of a paypal donation system for OLFSL and it has worked really well, we got a good amount of donations which has kept the service running all this time as well as buying some of the hardware to do it.

At the moment the service is now into the red (or minus if you like) - I am willing to continue to pay the server rental to the end of the season if needed (although if some donations come in that would be cool) - however next season is a different matter. I will not pay the server rental from my own money, either we need more donations, or it stops, or we find other ways to do this service.

There are a few options for next season, here are some for you to think about.

Keep it the same.
Stop it.
Subscription system.
P2P streaming.

Thought i'd explain these a bit more.

Keep it the same:
Keep the same system, but if donations run dry the stream stops.

Stop it:
Stop the stream altogether.

Subscription system
A subscription system for stream viewing - the added bonus here is that if people were interested in subscribing, we could use a much better system for better sound and video quality - but we would need around £50 per month.

More detail for a possible subscription system - lets say for the moment that the system would cost £1 each per viewer per month, this would mean we would need 50 willing viewers, if we had less than the charge would be more, 25 x £2 etc.

Would be able to rent a better server, such as a Windows Media Server, or Flash Media Server - these would provide better quality than we have now, although they still wouldn't be fantastic as the system still relies on the current low upload speed).

P2P streaming:
This option seems quite interesting, using the P2P system, instead of sending the stream to a rented server, we all send the stream to eachother via P2P, many of you may already do something similar if you download from P2P sites already.

In theory quality could be increased with this, as the data and bandwidth is being shared by everyone, although for an optimum stream it would need a good lot of people watching the stream and no leeching.

Any ideas of suggestions?

How about 1 more option: increase quality of broadcast?

One possible thought is that of a tiered service.

Paid members get access to a smaller dedicated server and free members use the P2P service.

that's an interesting one Fireball - although I think it would involve sending the same stream data twice, which is not an option, unless I'm thinking it wrong.

The data itelf will be encoded once, but would need say one program Windows Media Encoder for the subscripton and the p2p (peercast for example) system for the free one.

But if we had two different streamers this would be an option yes.

--- HackerX

You can't just increase the quality I'm afraid, its not that simple at all.

The P2P streaming sounds like a good idea but that means ideally that anyone should upload at least in the same speed as he downloads if we are talking for real time stream.
But that brings a problem because most ISPs give you way more download than upload.
I wonder how many users have over 300kbps upload. (I have a theoretical 192kbps upload)

Is it impossible to find a sponsor to support the stream? That means you can guarantee a standard quality for that service cause that could be a mean of advertising

Well I did put the idea of a sponser on the forum a while back, but it came up for big critiscm.

Regarding the p2p and upload thing, no, as long as everyone watching has a fairly good upload speed (150kps and above) then it is fine, as everyone is just sending a tiny bit of the stream to other people, rather than one person sending the whole stream onto the next.

The sytem relies on a lot of people trading small bits you see.