Live chase webcast?

[Rockwell Schrock]

Has anyone here ever attempted to do a live webcast while chasing? I think it would be a great experience to send pictures and audio back home so friends and family could follow along without actually being there. Imagine the thrill of webcasting a tornado as it happens!

Bandwidth is clearly an obstacle here, but I believe it could be plausible if you ran TeamSpeak at a really low quality and uploaded images every few seconds (as opposed to streaming live). You could even upload an image every minute or so showing your current position on a map (from GPS). If you have one of those weather stations mounted on your car, you might also upload live data from that. You wouldn't have to worry about this bandwidth use interfering with data downloading, since by the time you're close enough to the storm to start the webcast you shouldn't really need any more data. I think I'll experiment with this later tonight to see how well it works (or doesn't work).

Just a thought.

 

[JR Hehnly]

Already working on a similar project. Wrote software to send my gps info and webcam image once a minute back to my server. A script on my server takes the info to fetch a map from mapquest.
I hope to have it done by march, have not dedicated much time to get it pretty yet.
It works while I'm connected to internet, either by cell or by wifi connection.
You can check out my progress at:
http://www2.okstorms.com:8080/cgi-bin/GPSlive.cgi
Need to finish page script to show webcam image and direction of travel on a compass. Also, the software that sends the gps info has some glitches to fix, it hangs if I lose internet connection while it is sending.
I tried some webcam software that could capture off the firewire port to my camcorder, but it slowed my laptop way down. I'd love to find some firewire webcam software that didn't do that, the images from the camcorder are much better than from the Logitec webcam.
In all, it's working pretty well and I'm excited about letting people see what I see and where I am while chasing.

 

[Rockwell Schrock]

Wow, that looks awesome. What language did you write the client-side software in? And what API or control do you use to get info from the GPS device?

You might want to consider also adding images from Microsoft's TerraServer to that page.

 

[JR Hehnly]

Used Visual Basic for the client software using activex from Franson GpsTools to get the GPS info.

The server side script is written in Perl

 

[David Schuttler]

I ran across this one last night. http://www.gpstuner.com/

For pocket pc but might be a work around for lap's.

 

[cedwards]

If you are a Ham operator, you can use APRS to transmit your location. People can see it on a map or even overlayed on a radar image online. Coverage is pretty good in most chase areas. You can even send comments like what you are seing, or even weather obbs with a weather station.

Here is an example:
http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?call...rra=4&radar=***

 

[JR Hehnly]

I'm familiar with the APRS system, but have never seen a station in operation. I think Jeff Snyder may have a setup, but I'm not sure. Do all APRS transmitters in an area appear on a common map, or can you have a map with just your vehicle shown.
My GPS reporting system is almost ready... seems to work great. The only issue I have is that my script fetches a map from a Mapquest page which I'm sure is a violation of their usage policy. I'd like to find another way to get a map of my position.

 

[cedwards]

Yes, you can specify who you want on a map. here is an example:

http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?call...=0.04&radar=***

You can also use your own drawn maps if you want. findu.com has examples of scripts that you can do this with.

 

[Bill Tabor]

Yes, I've thought of doing it for some time; however I would want it done right. I don't get much out of current webcams that mostly show still images. I would truly want to stream broadband webcast type info from a dashcam complete with audio in realtime. Of course this means a high bandwidth wireless connection anywhere while roaming the plains, - and of course that currently doesn't exist. There is talk of a new widespread wireless high bandwidth network eventually being set up. When that occurs the dream of really being able to share your chase with others in realtime will come alive.

Until then I doubt I'll bother. As it is I can just upload images to my website while in the field.