I am going to be organizing a tournament this weekend, and I was thinking if it would be feasible to use a bunch of webcams to video the games, and maybe stream them online. Is this possible?

So far I was only going to take a laptop and one webcam, but I thought that it might be possible to use several on the same pc, and stream them online.

Have you ever done something like this? If so, any recommendations on software, sites, tips, things to avoid?

P.S. - Wonder if this was better in General Go Chat...

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

It would delend on which streaming service you use. You also need to make sure that you have enough physical ports on your computer to connect all of the cameras.

How so? Could you elaborate on the streaming service comment? Which one would be best for this?

As for the physical ports, I was thinking of using a USB hub.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

You would need multiple accounts, running from the same computer, so you would need to find a service that allows that. I am not sure which ones do, but you would need to figure it out.
A USB hub would work fine

Also, depending on the venue, you'll need to make sure you have enough bandwidth for the quality of stream that you're intending on doing.

A smartphone up on a stack of books or something might work nice too. Ive done a simalar thing but, but it wasnt for a go board. The set up resembled a diving board

Multiple accounts would likely be a problem...I doubt many services allow something like it...
I think I'll focus on getting the top game broadcast, and if possible, using other webcams just to record games for later conversion to sgf.

As for bandwith, I know they have wi-fi, but won't be able to do bandwith tests until friday. How much do you think would be necessary for one cam vs multiple cams?

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

The highest possibility HD is 8Mb/s (bits not bytes I'm not sure I got the capitalization right but it is bits not bytes).
You don't need that, you could probably get low-end HD for close to 2Mb/s(again bits not bytes), but you don't NEED this either. the best way to be sure is always just to test.
Edit: for multiple streams, just multiply the amount of data by the number of streams

the only ones I know with experience with this are vash3g (on this forum), or baltimore (on kgs)


yes