Use it!!

Click on the "Theora Streaming Studio" icon on the desktop :

Alternatively, you can open a terminal and type the command "tss".

The application should start and the first thing you see is something like this :

As you can see the window is divided basically in four areas.

The upper menu where you can load and save your encoding and streaming settings.

The main notebook is where you can configure the settings of the source and target(s) of your process.

The two big buttons "Execute" and "Stop" will start/stop your encoding/streaming process.

And the Virtual Terminal ( black window at the bottom of the GUI ) will give you some information and error messages for the encoding/streaming process.

1. the first step is to choose the video source of your stream, this is done in the "source" page of the notebook.

As you can see, you can choose between two different video sources: "dv input" to use a dv-camera or other firewire video device or the "video file" option to stream or reencode any video file from your hard drive.

2. the next step is to setup at least one of the targets, so go to the "target1" page and you will see the target configured with the default settings.





Configure the encodding settings as you like, the default settings are good to send an audio/video stream using about 128Kbps of bandwidth.
All the metadata fields are optionals.

In the "icecast server settings" you must put the correct values for your streaming server, port, mountpoint and password. If you leave any of this fields empty, the target is NOT configured to stream, but still can be used as a video encoder using the "dump to local file" one.

If you put a filename in the "dump to local file" field the theora encoded video will be written on your hard disk.

NOTE: the TSS interface give you the option to encode two "targets" at the same time from the same source. This will be useful for example to stream video in two different qualities in two different mountpoints, to cover different audiences with different bandwidth. But be careful with the CPU usage in that case.

3. the last step: Execute!

When you click on the "Execute" button your encoding(s) and streaming tasks will start. Take attention to the terminal because there you will get important information about the processes, connections, etc...



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Some tips about the preview window
The preview window is enabled by default, it will show you the result for the first "target", so if you are encodding two targets at the same time, we recommend you to use the "target1" as the lowest quality to reduce the CPU cost of the preview.

If your soundcard does not support full duplex the preview will not work.

If your preview audio or video drops it is likely that you are using too much CPU or too much bandwidth with your settings.