<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1595" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV>Hello List,</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>thanks for including me. In case you didn't receive my answer to Edward's mail that I just sent - here it is:</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Hi Edward, thanks for your quick answer. Sorry for not putting direct questions in my e-mail. What I wanted to know was if GStreaner can do all that - and you addressed all the points. I had the idea that you could help me because I found a GStreamer-link and realized, that you and your team has the knowledge of all that technical details for my TV station project.  According to your mail GStreamer can do most of the things I would like to do. It can handle even these long stream addresses and all thinkable formats. But you only see things without audio, so I can't control audio levels. Yesterday I found vjdirector 1.3 on the net which is almost like DVmixer but it can handle stream. Still it crashes as well maybe due to buffering of the streams. The thing I forgot to mention: Because I'm not able to afford satellite link up or a microwave truck, I plan to feed the reports from the correspondents via MSN or other applications which allow you to quickly get multi-media files across. The live reports should be also provided via streaming video. I only suppose, if it has to be pre-renderer or bufferd, there will always be a lot of dead air before the correspondent reponds to the anchors in the studio. I visited several dozens of TV stations over the years, and most of them of course use expensive hardware - at the moment not possible to afford for a student without much money. To make it possible at all I thought it would be possible to run this thing from a normal computer. That wouldn't be any problem if I only would wanna broadcast recorded content. Because I 'd like to do at least one newscast in the beginning and expand on that after money and manpower comes in. Anytime a story breaks I would like to interrupt the program and take the live coverage of all those local stations. But living in Germany non of that is available via normal satellite or cabe channels. The only way to get it is via internet-streams. That would give me an advantage to all those other german channels who are not very quick to react. If they are quick they take CNN Europe or Sky News which in return has to take their footage from CNN USA and Fox News. These steps in between let German media always look one step behind. Let me set the scene - local television here in Leipzig Local coverage on the other hand is very limited. Most stations - especially in East germany only have one daily "newscast" which is nothing compared with English speaking countries. It is a mixture of "paid for-" or PR reports and service content, limiting the actual news to 1ß minutes. All looks very amateurish. And the 30 sec weather forecast is the biggest joke on earth. Any English speaking television viewer would shake his head or die laughing. In the field of graphics and titles they learned a bit during the last years so at least that doesn't look as home-made as it used to look. But still they have neither time and temperature, nor crawl titles or even animated backgrounds. The live content is limited to half an hour to one hour a day plus two hours pre-recorded. The rest of our local channel Leipzig Fernsehen's content is filled with re-runs of these daily 3 hours plus paid-for call in game shows where stupid people spend 2 Euros a minute tryin to call but nobody is let through. If there is no 9live during the night they show soft-porn and telephone sex commercials. You see - if I quickly could build an audience online and than apply for a license, this thing wouldn't be the biggest competition on earth. The state sponsored public broadcaster MDR of course has a wider coverage area and a bigger budget and that really shows. OK, ther is no morning news, now news later than 10PM, no breaking news and stuff. But being a full service TV station it is no news channel anyway. But as it is for national TV, MDR is very slow to react - even to stories happening in the prime broadcast area. MDR serves the German states of Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt and thueringen and is available nationally and also across Europe via satellite - just like the local BBCs in the UK. The demand for a information oriented channel which provides real news and which is quick to react to breaking stories is there. I have no research to provide numbers, but all of the students for example never watch LF or a lot of MDR. They say, LF is too bad and MDR is for old people. And all those people who really work would like to have something uptodate. That's why the news radio MDR Info fills the information gap left by MDR TV very well. So I guess a TV channel doing the same thing would get even more attention. Is GStreamer a stand alone application in windows or does that still have to be written? SCENARIO: I think I need three computers for news-input 1. switches between the (at least) 4 Studio cameras 2. has the correspondents or outside live shots 3 has the breaking news livestreams I already have created an American local TV weather animation file with Scala Info Channel Designer. In order to superimpose that on the green screen do I have to do it before I feed the wheather-anchor's studio cam into the camera-inputs computer or later? Computer 4 is the master control input of the 3 above - or 4 if I do weather on a seperate one. That is the one that hold the intros, titles and animated backgrounds. Computer 5 scales and encodes the content in windows media for the internet and mpeg2 for broadcast. Would this scenario work? Or is there a way to do it with less computers? Do I lose quality by doing that? Is it possibe to feed the material from the 3 inputs as "raw video-out" unencoded into the fourth? How much memory, CPU-power and what big a harddrive do should each of the computers have? Thanks again for your help Juergen </DIV> <DIV>----------------------------------------------- Leipzig News Service c/o Juergen Theil W.-Zipperer-Str. 63 04177 Leipzig Germany</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Phone: +49-3221-2615237 Mobile: +49-178-5429861 MSN: <A href="mailto:leipzignews@hotmail.com">leipzignews@hotmail.com</A> ICQ: 298068847 <A href="http://myspace.com/leipzignews">http://myspace.com/leipzignews</A> -------------------------------------------------</DIV></BODY></HTML>