New Livestreaming Systems!

Written by PiE Team on Mar 17, 2015

You might have noticed that PiE has been livestreaming each of our season events this year! That’s correct, we are revamping our production value!

More concretely, we are interested in letting visitors of Youtube Channel and our Twitch.tv stream see how exciting our program is in addition to our live visitors and local community. (they are [https://www.youtube.com/pierobotics][0], and [http://www.twitch.tv/pierobotics][1])

Here is our UC Berkeley campus headquarters livestream setup:


The notable change from last year is our use of new camera technology. Previously we used the [Microsoft Lifecam Studio][2], but had to use [Monoprice’s 16ft. active USB extenders][3] to achieve the cable length required for the desired shots. Additionally, the computer needed 4 USB Root Hubs in order to stream 1080p video from 4 cameras simultaneously, which was prone to failure and caused video glitches.


We are now using [123 CCTV Security Camera][4] and [CCTV Camera World][5]’s generous joint donation of their [security cameras][6]. These are designed to stream 1080p h.264 encoded video over Ethernet, which does not require breaking any cable length specification (as was the case with our USB rigging). These are traditionally used for security purposes, but 123 CCTV Security Camera and CCTV Camera World have helped us access the RTSP video stream directly for use in our video streaming pipeline.!

On the software front, we are taking a step in uploading matches with audio. Because we play non-royalty-free music at our events, we can’t upload the raw video stream to youtube without copyright infringement on the music. To this end, we are recording the microphone audio exclusively using Audacity, and using the resultant audio with our uploaded videos.