Mini Media Mac

Peer-to-peer broadcasting over iChat AV

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Bill Douthett (Digital Bill of Wizards of Technology fame) and I are big fans of film director Kevin Smith and his Jersey Trilogy. When news hit recently that Smith would be appearing in a 3 episode story arc of "Degrassi: The Next Generation", I was stoked. But, Bill...not so much.

"WTF is 'Degrassi'?"

Degrassi in its various forms is a curious Canadian television phenomenon that was a favorite of Kevin Smith's while he worked as a clerk at the Red Bank, New Jersey Quik Stop he later made famous. He also made reference to Degrassi in nearly every one of his films. You'd think a show given that kind of attention would be more famous but it isn't even all that big here in Canada, and even less so in Fort Lauderdale, FL where Bill lives. It does broadcast there but on the N and on a delay of several weeks...and who wants to wait weeks to see Jay and Silent Bob battle Canadian Ninjas? Not Bill, I can tell you that.

The solution involves iChat AV, an ADS Tech Pyro A/V Link analog to digital converter (from here on referred to as "the Pyro"), two broadband connections (for the sender and the receiver) and little else. I connected the video and right and left audio out from my VCR to the video and right and left audio in on the Pyro. Next, I set the Pyro to Analog Mode and stretched a Firewire cable from it to the Firewire port on the Mac. I then simply logged into iChat AV and specified the Pyro as both my"camera" and my "microphone" in the Video pane of iChat's Preferences and, bikkity-bam, I was broadcasting whatever played on my VCR over iChat AV. If you attempt this yourself, you may also need to set iChat's Bandwidth Limit to about 200Kbps, so you don't overrun the person on the receiving end (never a bad idea when video chatting over DSL or other bandwidth-limiting connections).

When Monday night rolled around, I just emailed Bill in the morning to let him know that at 8:30pm PST he should be on iChat awaiting an invition for a One-Way Video Chat and that was that. When the show was about to air, I selected Bill's iChat screenname and sent the invitation via the Buddies menu. Once he accepted he was able to watch the episode "virtually live." There were a few problems with the signal dropping off, but if the person on the sending end of the rig keeps a close eye on the preview window, it is easy to see when trouble occurs and simply re-invite the receiver.

After the show was over, we found that this method also worked for broadcasting VHS video cassettes and even DVDs. Granted, the video is heavily compressed, but if you just want to get the idea across and share a movie with a friend online, this is a pretty cool way to do it.