How WCCA's stream works

WCCA's live video stream was created entirely using free software. It doesn't depend on any proprietary software from Microsoft or Apple. We create it with the VLC media player and the Ubuntu operating system. This is how we made it happen.

WCCA's stream set up involves two servers, a server at WCCA with a modest DSL internet connection that digitizes WCCA's signal, and WCCA's web server which has lots of bandwidth and can handle many simultaneous connections. At the station, we use a Plextor ConnectX TV402U to convert WCCA's broadcast signal into digital format. Since the TV402U doesn't support encoding directly into Windows media format, we then transcode it into Windows Media format for streaming using VLC.

We use the WIS Streamer software to create a high quality digital stream from the broadcast signal that's only used locally. The following command creates a passworded 1.5MBps MPEG2 stream with audio in the mpeg audio format. It may be possible to eliminate this step and have VLC read directly from the Video for Linux device driver, but this works well enough for our purposes.

/usr/src/wis-streamer/wis-streamer -u wcca:password -mpegaudio 256 -tntsc -i0 -r1500000

On the same computer at the station, we run VLC to transcode this stream into Windows Media format. We use DIV3, the Windows Media MPEG4 video format, and mp3 audio, like your favorite music files, because they're known to work with Microsoft's player. The 128kbps video stream plus two 32kbps channels of mp3 audio combine to make a 192kpbs stream. We use the Windows Media streaming format. It should be possible to also create a QuickTime compatible stream, but we have not investigated this yet.

vlc -R -I http --http-host 127.0.0.1:8081 -v rtsp://wcca:password@127.0.0.1:8554/ 
   --sout '#transcode{vcodec=DIV3,vb=128,scale=1,acodec=mp3,ab=32,channels=2}:std{access=mmsh,mux=asfh,dst=:8080,user=wcca,pwd=password}'

On our web server, we run another copy of VLC. This is the one people connect to when they watch the stream. We do this because our web server has enough bandwidth to handle many users, while the DSL line at the station does not.

vlc -R -I http --http-host localhost:8081 -vvv mmsh://wcca:password@1.2.3.4:8080/ --sout  '#std{access=mmsh,mux=asfh,dst=www.wccatv.com:8080}'

That's it! We have a few platform specific scripts to start and stop the stream, but that's the extent of our configuration. If you're interested in setting up something similar, the VLC streaming manual is online, and I'm always glad to help out.

Please keep this stream running by donating to WCCA TV13.

If you're using Firefox on Windows, you may need to install the Windows Media plugin.

VLC: The free VLC media player does a good job and runs on just about any computer. After you download it, open WCCA's VLC playlist in the program.

Mac: If you have a Mac, you'll need the Windows Media Components for Quicktime to view the stream in the browser.

Linux: If you're on a Linux based OS, like Ubuntu, virtually any of the available media players including VLC, mplayer, xine, and totem should play the stream. You may have to install the restricted formats to add support for Microsoft formats.

The URL for the stream is mms://www.wccatv.com:8080/ for most video players. VLC users should use mmsh://www.wccatv.com:8080/ As of this writing VLC can't automatically detect that we're using MMS over HTTP.

For updates on the stream, see the tech blog. You can also learn how we made our stream using all free software.

If the stream doesn’t seem to be working, please add a comment below.

Now even if you do not have cable access, or you live outside of Worcester, you can still enjoy WCCA’s wide variety of quality programming. If the fact that you don’t have cable has stopped you from becoming a member and producing your own TV show, there’s no longer any reason to hold yourself back!