By way of a brief introduction, I’m Tom Herman vice president of product development for ooVoo. I’ll keep this post brief, or as brief as I can make it. There have been many requests by ooVoo users who want to broadcast their ooVoo conversation over the internet… to many people at the same time. It's pretty easy to do and here are the steps:
1) Download a virtual camera software, there are many out there, but one we have used successfully here in the test lab at ooVoo is SplitCam (http://www.SplitCamera.com). It's free and stable.
2) Launch splitcam and set the video source to "Desktop".
3) Set the frame rate to 30 FPS and test both interlaced and de-interlaced for highest quality
4) You now have a virtual web camera that looks like a real camera pointed at your desktop. If you have a broadcast solution, then you're all set, just grab this "virtual" video camera as the source for your broadcast. If you don't have a broadcast solution, you can use a free one like uStream.TV (http://www.uStream.tv). At their homepage, click the "broadcast now" button and set up an account.
5) On ustream, you also want to make sure to set the video and audio qualities as high as they will go. uStream allows you to embed your video stream w/ an HTML snippet into your web site and it also allows you to just give the uStream URL for people to watch your broadcast on their web site.
6) Once you have SplitCam and uStream all set up and you're ready to go, you need to launch ooVoo and start your call. Then make the ooVoo window 100% and you'll see that the broadcast shows your whole desktop, but that means it just shows ooVoo since at 100% it takes up your whole desktop. SplitCam doesn't recognize an "extended desktop", so if you use two monitors, you can open up a web browser in your second monitor and see the broadcast of your ooVoo conversation which takes up all of your 1st monitor.
A couple of notes... First this is all free. Second, the quality of uStream isn't the greatest. To really broadcast to many people at the same time in high quality and high resolution, you obviously will need to pay for that service. ooVoo doesn't offer that service right now, but we're looking at providing this in the future. However the more requests we receive for this feature on our feedback page, the more likely that it will happen... (http://www.oovoo.com//about/feedback.aspx).
Finally, you'll notice that SplitCam comes up in the web cam choices under ooVoo. In this way, if you are in an ooVoo video conference and want to show someone on the video call with you an image, a video file, a web page or whatever you're looking at on your computer, it's very easy to just change from your web cam (Logitech or built in cam, or whatever) to the SplitCam virtual camera which is showing a feed of your desktop. Pretty cool, eh?
Got any other power tips or what to share more idea? Contact me at Tom.Herman@oovoo.com.
Tom Herman,
vice president of product development