Webcast!!!

Time is running fast, it's already week 3! This reminds me, I was very busy with BOP and compcomm lately, and it's about time to start studying really hard.

There was a Saturday lecture, which is 3 HOURS LONG! Somehow it didn't make sense to attend the lecture, since falling asleep there after 2 hours of intense brain work won't make it worth while to go, and there will be a webcast anyway, so I decided to webcast it in easier-to-stomach bits of one hour chunks.

While webcasting using VLC player, I discovered something, VLC can import the whole stream and save it to the computer! Cool!

Now I can play the webcast again and again without worrying about network giving me problems or slow loads. I can even play the video in QuickTime™, the best all-in-one practical media software in the world! I can play it at 2X, or even 3X, and still be able to understand what the lecturer is saying, which is a good thing, because this lecturer talks very slowly, and has long pauses in between...

Well, here's what I did: (Copying/Importing Video Streams Using VLC)

1. Open the stream in VLC (click on the small macintosh icon on the webcast page)
2. Go to File | Streaming/Exporting Wizard
3. Select Transcode/Save to File, Next
4. Choose the Stream you are streaming from the Existing Playlist Item, Click Next
5. Transcode both Audio and Video (I recommend H.264, a superb video encoder, bitrate 512 should do it; and MPEG-4 audio, AAC - great, bitrate 64 will be fine for audio)
6. Of course, choose MP4 as the container, duh!

Then you are ready to go! Wait for it to stream slowly (1x speed, since it's streaming, any faster may cause the server to suspect)

Well, so much for today, I will be enjoying my webcast! Byes!