This guide will explain the basic steps to stream live TV over the internet or your local network using Windows Media Encoder (wmv video).

Hardware required

Capture card with TV-in/Video-in

Tools Required

Windows Media Encoder 9 (freeware)

Windows Media Encoder Guide

A. Start Windows Media Encoder and close the Wizard.

1. Under Tools->Options change to NTSC if you live in a NTSC country(USA, Canada, Japan) and PAL if you live in a PAL country(basicly the rest of the world)



B. Make a new session by click on New session or under File->New
1.Select Broadcast a live event


C. Configure Capture device options
1.Change to your default capture device.
2.Click on configure to change capture device default settings, this is different between capture devices. I usually use low resolutions for streaming over the net so 352/320x240(NTSC) or 384/352x288(PAL) should be enough.



D. Broadcast Method
1. Select Pull from the encoder



E. Broadcast Connection
1. Click on Find Free Port
2. Copy the URL (this is your IP and you must be online when you do this)



F. Encoding options
1. Under Video and audio you can select different video and audio quality templates, I usually use low quality like VHS templates.
2. Choose the bitrate, higher bitrate means better quality but it requires faster internet.



G. Archive
1. If you want to archive the capture specify a location
2. Hit Finish



H. Encoding and streaming
1. Start the Encoding



H. Test and View stream
1. To view the stream just use the URL you copied above and paste it in Windows Media Player using File->Open URL. You can play it in some other Video Players also but it may require that you replace the http:// in the url with mms://, like mms://192.168.0.1:3044 .


H. Publish the stream with SopCast
1. Open SopCast software, and log in with the user you registered in SopCast.
2. Click "MyServer" tab.
3. Select "Stream" as the Source, and fill your real stream URL in the text box below.
4. Fill out other necessary fields, such as channel ID, Program name (option), usename and password.
5. Click "Start", your channel will be listed on SopCast after 5 minutes.