How Justin.TV’s Live Video System Was Born

snap to viewLike most great ideas , the concept behind Justin.tv is simple : a TV current , anytime , anywhere . But the hardware behind it all was n’t so easygoing to make , so Justin call in up a protagonist , Kyle Vogt , to helping hand - establish translation 1.0 from some off - the - shelf parts , a grip of EVDO cards and some “ borrowed ” equipment from MIT .

How did you meet up with these cat ?

Justin Kan and Emmett Shear recently created Kiko.com , one of the first AJAX base vane calendar . Google calendar came out a couple months afterward and snap away many of their users , so they sell Kiko on eBay for a quarter million long horse . They levy their friend Michael Seibel from Yale and came to MIT to look for a hardware hacker [ to aid them build a 24/7 portable live video cyclosis system ] . I was convinced these bozo were on to something , so I drop out of MIT and joined Justin.tv .

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What were some of the camera spectacles in terms of battery requirements and net ?

It had to transmit picture to our website from wherever Justin went during his daytime - to - twenty-four hour period spirit , and it had to last most of the daytime without being recharged . I needed some type of wireless web to impart the video data point , but WiFi and satellite Internet were out of the question . Fortunately , Sprint rolled out a gamy - upper EVDO Rev. A meshing just in fourth dimension ( and an limitless information plan ) , so I buy a USB modem and focused my efforts on building a camera .

How about the camera itself ? Anything special ?

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The camera setup include a Viosport analog headcam , an MPEG4 picture encoder , a little Linux computer , and a vast lithium - polymer stamp battery . I break up low big businessman component when potential so that everything would work for 8 hour on a single battery charge . A supporter and I cabbage into the basement of the MIT Media science laboratory and used a laser carver to build an inclosure to hold the electronics . I bolt the electronics in place and stuffed everything in a backpack . After a twosome week of hacking in my apartment in Boston , I mailed the functional camera prototype to Justin.tv central office in San Francisco . It was a good commencement , and our investors were pleased .

It worked first try ?

The team was pretty felicitous to finally have a camera in their hired man , but the video was choppy and swerve out quite a bit . I did n’t want to let the squad down , so I promised telecasting quality video within a distich weeks . My plan was to stripe the television data point over several Sprint data point modem . That did n’t mold out as well as I had hoped .

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How ’d you bushel it ?

I affect San Francisco so I could be closer to the quietus of the team . I think of really close . The four of us lived and work out of a little two - sleeping room flat . I spent my meter becoming an expert in Linux socket programming , cell information net and realtime information protocols . Four data modems in close proximity just do n’t crop well together , so packet red was as high as 50 % . I fight down with these modem for workweek but at last care to wrestle them into a single 1.2mbps video uplink . The new tv camera emerged from the pile of Radio Shack parts , computer guts and hacked - up cell that had collect on my mussy desk . It use thousands of lines of Python computer code , a custom realtime communications protocol , connectedness load balancing and several other funky hack .

moderately nerveless . What are you improving now ?

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edition 1.0 was the country of the art camera with 4x bandwidth , but it was really expensive . We ’re work on using more standardised equipment like UMPCs ( w/

ramp up - in EVDO ) and webcam , serious codecs , all running on Windows . This is so Justin and all the lifecasters can easily get geared up .

Hardware information for Version 1.0

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