Streaming Audio across Local Work Network

[fige18]

Morning All

I have a request I need help with please, in our company our ops team have call listening sessions between sites. So at the moment they basically set up a conference call and one of them will have the call on their laptop with speakers and play it down the phone to everyone on the call, they sometimes pause the call discuss then carry on. Problem being is the phone pick the speakers up as background noise so its not very loud and just not generally an ideal solution.

I want them to be able to just stream the audio across all of their laptops and be on a conference call at the same time. I have found a way of doing this through VLC player, when the host has to go through the streaming wizard, the clients need a vlc shorcut on their desk top the the host ips etc in the shortcut. This works great but with the hosts changing on each call and their IP address changing, its not as simple for them setting up as it is for me being IT literate. I wanted to write them a guide on how to be the streaming host and did them a script to get their IP address. Anyway turns out my boss still thinks it's not simple enough for them.

He has asked if I could get all done on a webpage or a more simple way similar to the above. To be honest I would not be to sure on the webpage setup if anyone could help? Ideally it would be a webpage they could all go to and one person could be upload a audio or more than one file and when they click play eveyone on that page will hear the audio playing. Would this be possible or does anyone have any other ideas?

Laptops & machines vary from XP and Windows 7, across sites they are all on the same domaim, network.

Any help much appreciated, thanks Chris.

 

[Subbynet]

Have a look on the Winamp/SHOUTcast forums. you can use a SHOUTcast server, and if you poke around on the forums you should find a way to list the current streams on a webpage - there was an app called wwwinamp which allowed you to control Winamp from a website (see streams and connect etc), but not sure if its still available as it was quite some time ago when I last used it - but you could then show to your staff and they can use this to connect.

 

[fige18]

thanks for the reply, i took a brief look at winamp 1st as I use to use it ages ago as a teenager for radio :S. I think it iwll be the same as VLC when the host needs to set all the settings everytime, VLC worked fine just the actual setup of it. Would be good to just have it as simple as possible for the end users.....

Chris

 

[Subbynet]

Yeah it would work pretty much the same, apart from being able to view the streams on a website. So you wouldn't need to set it up each time messing around with IP addresses, the URL's will be generated by the server. You would just need to give them a URL of a website you can host locally. They choose a stream - WinAMP opens up, connects to the stream and starts playing.

Its exactly the same way as the thousands of internet "radio" stations are doing it, but the only people listening to yours will be your staff.

 

[lynxus]

You can also use something called "Windows media encoder" this normally allows people to connect into your machine and listen directly.

Or you could look into multicast technology. VLC has multicast broadcast ability.