Can Skype calls be streamcast?

Hi, everyone - Miller Copeland here, a newbie. I'm in SL to learn as much as I can about producing live events - this is what I do in RL Chicago as well (see my profile for details), and in fact will most likely be streamcasting all our RL live events (60 our first year) into SL starting this fall.

I've also become interested, though, in hosting game-exclusive events; say, for example, a regular poetry slam, where all the participants are residents. As as result I'm just starting to learn about things like streamcasting and Skype for the first time, and had a beginner question - does anyone know if Skype calls can in fact be streamcast live on the web?

Think of the opportunities this would provide SL event producers, if such a system could be set up: performers gathering at a virtual club together in SL, phoning in their performances from whatever RL location they find themselves. You could have very easy open mics, group performances, even jam sessions, without any of the performers themselves having to go through the complicated process of setting up their own streamcast; simply set up a Skype account instead, and pipe it into a group conference call your club is running during the event. Why, Skype even released a test version of new software this week, letting people hook together up to 100 callers into one group conference, and to even set privileges over who gets to talk and be heard:

http://share.skype.com/sites/en/2006/05/early_preview_of_skypecasts.html

I'd love to figure out a way to do this, if it can't already be done; if any enthusiastic techies want to talk more, just beep me in-game or in RL at ilikejason [at] gmail dot com. Thanks for whatever info you can provide.

Hi there I suggest getting in contact with Johnny Ming. We have streamed a couple of our live Skype conferences into SL with a studio audience while we have been recording our podcast, so it is definitely doable. He would be able to provide the technical details on how to go about it - it is a great idea.

The best way to reach him is probably through the pocast site at http://www.secondcast.com - there is a contact link there.

If you're using a Mac, you can use a program called Nicecast to broadcast Skype to a shoutcast server to play inside Second Life. Or, alternately, you can just route the Skype audio into whatever mixer your broadcast software has.

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/nicecast/

I've been using Simplecast to stream Skype calls. I find Skype's quality to be vastly supperior to Google Talk. All you have to do is make sure that your audio settings control panel is set to stereo mix. Simplecast will then stream any and all audio coming through your PC's sound card.

Here's the tricky part, Skype likes to own your soundcard, in other words, it won't let any other app control it. (Trying to talk in layman's terms here) So when you launch Skype, you won't be able to select stereo mix and therefor have Simplecast stream the Skype call. What you need to do, and what I do, is hold the skype conversation on one computer, run the line out of that sound card to the line in on another computer, which runs Simplecast and sends the stream.

SL is a resource hog so encoding an audio stream on any machine that is also running SL has it's challenges. Regardless of which machine you run SL on, you'll have to mute the audio to avoid streaming your SL sound effects.

I use an old 600mhz machine running win2k and 256k of ram for the streaming, it really doesn't take much to do it. You can pick one up open market for chump change.

Simplecast requires a server to bounce the stream off of, but unless you are talking about just one or two people listening to you, you'll need that anyway.

Server's run from $15 to $100 a month, but there are several companies in SL renting them by the hour as well. Consult your server provider for info about setting up Simplecast to log into their server.

You didn't look at the other links on the same page:


TypePad makes it easy to share Skypecasts:
http://share.skype.com/sites/en/2006/05/typepad_makes_it_easy_to_share.html

Ahh but then you can't listen to it in SL. It has to be Shoutcast as SL uses Winamp to decode streaming audio.

i thought it used quicktime

SL doesn't use Winamp, it uses FMOD.


SL uses Quicktime for streaming video only.