What is required to stream a QW match to the web? So a spectator who's way too lazy to actually download Quakeworld (or maybe it's not possible to dl quake at his location for some reason) can watch some bigass final through a stream in his web browser?

Streaming requires vast amounts of bandwidth. You'll need at least 25kB/s per streaming client and then it's still in a lowly resolution with pretty poor sound quality - not that it would be too poor to watch a QW game. Do we really have this kind of bandwidth available? I mean, it's more than 2Mbit/s with 10 people streaming, and for a big game we could easily see 50-100. That's a 10Mbit/s line or two right there. When will we see bittorrent-like protocols for streaming media? :\

EDIT: Actually, a quick google revealed Peercast.org. Maybe it's possible after all, though I haven't actually looked much into what's possible with this software.

In ezQuake, we've been discussing the possibility of interconnecting the demo_capture feature with VLC Media Player which could then be used to broadcast the video stream to others. I guess Cokeman could tell you more about the possibilities.
Other possibility is to capture a QuakeWorld client window with some external app. But the first way seems more "clean" to me.

Thanks for the post. It would be interesting to see if something like this was possible with a minimum bandwidth usage. I remember watching the Painkiller finals on such a stream without even having to download the game and i found it quite enjoyable. Not to the extent that i started playing PK afterwards though, but that's just because it's a worse game than QW right.

Streaming a game would be a way straight into the action for all lazy bums who can't be arsed to download a QW package, download a good demo and then get to know how to play the demo. Spectating QW would be more accessible = good.

Yea I've looked into this possibility, the easiest option would be to add support for capturing to mpeg instead of just avi like there is now. The benefit with mpeg is that you don't need a complete file before you can start reading it, so basically you could start a capture to mpeg in quake, and then open that mpeg file in VLC/Mplayer, and use their capabilities for streaming to stream it over the internet, either in multi- or unicast.

The easiest way to do this would probably be to use ffmpeg. The biggest problem with it is getting to work on windows since it's being developed for linux foremost. My efforts to try to incorporate it in a Visual Studio project failed, and I haven't tried it any further. The code to do the recording stuff itself doesn't seem to be a big issue though.

well it would be better to have it for linux anyway as it would likely be run in a command-line manner, streaming the display to video rather than display it and seeing as like 90% of qw servers are run on linux aren't they...

That most QW servers are on Linux doesn't really matter, does it? Wouldn't someone connect to the server, start capturing what he sees to an mpeg file and then stream it to the web in some way, no matter what the server OS is?

Yea this would be a client thing. Don't know how you propose doing it on the server side exactly? But basically, you could have a client computer doing the capture... Then with VLC you can retransmit to some server or several servers, that in turn serves the clients.... VLC can stream everything it can play.

Integrating ffmpeg in ezquake is probably a bit easier on the linux side though.

All too complicated sadly enough. Why don't we create a _minimalistic_ version of QuakeWorld, one that's straight-forward, you open it up, you type the QTV IP and it connects. Max dl < 10 MB, what about that?

What about commentary then? We'd want synced commentary to go with that too - from more than one commentator (without them having to be in the same room).

Synced? Just shoutcast it and open up the minamalistic quakeworld client for watching live games.

Shoutcast has a variable delay, so it most definitely won't be synced - come again.

When i watched the "CPMA Masters Final" some weeks ago i experienced this. I asked all specs wtf was going on and how to get rid of the delay. Apparently there is some plugin to winamp that makes it possible to manage such things, so you would get a perfect stream again.

The problem with shoutcast isn't the (random?) delay, it's that it isn't possible to have more than one commentator without a lot of hazzle. I think nopee (or someone, think it was him) explained how he had fixed that in another thread.

Update
I now remember that it wasn't on the forum nopee talked about multiple shoutcasters - it was on IRC. It's possible anyway, but i reckon it sounded tricky.

I wonder how much it would help bandwidth if the video was shot in ezQuake's r_drawflat mode with all-white player skins.

Tonik: probably halve it at most, still same scale order though.

The bittorent-ish casting idea is very interesting.... That could be the best way (getting the feed from a super-sized demo_capture as per cokeman).

How much work is it to implement this feature and is it any sort of priority for any of you QW programmers to pull it off?

Streaming QW matches for noobs without the proper explanation, does not worth the effort. Cause they'll not understand the game!

bittorent-ish: That's what Skype team is working on now .. You think a buch of QW developers can do same amount of work as Skype team?
vegetous: There are lots of very new features that help "read" the game when watching from MVD in ezQuake. Those are about to be used when watching QTV stream.

The basics of team deathmatch are the same in every FPS - kill the opposing team as many times as you can. What is there to explain? If 4on4 is too hard to comprehend for the newbies then the big 1on1 games will be perfect to stream anyway.

Exactly. All you have to do is find the person with quad/pent/stack and watch him

Imo, the more stuff the new players doesn't understand - the better. People think that Quake is so shallow, all you have to do is run around and kill people. But when someone explains to him why the player doesn't pick up penta immediately when he spawned there in the beginning of a DM3 game, then he might think there is more to it than just mindless gibbing. Same goes for all other small tricks that's necessary in order to puzzle your opponents.

Edit
And all there superxxxadvanced tactics would of course be explained by the expert shoutcast.

The problem is not understand the team play, but get used to how fast things happen in in the game. QW is too fast for noobs, most of my friends get lost when I try to show a game to them!

You are wrong. With commentary it would be just perfect and even without it would be very nice. They do not need to understand everything and the advertisement value of streaming would be enormous. Think about it some noob is pondering wtf is QW and then comes mr. vegetous with shitloads of url's and with even more advice how to run that shit. Now the noob thinks HMM? and the noob starts to wondering if it really is worth of all that trouble and comes to the conclusion that no its not. Because of taht you cant even advertise the big games to people not familiar with qw. "Click'n'enjoy" is the shit would you seriously go all that trouble to install the game,play around with the cmdline and cfg's and find demos or get to a qizmo cam just to see what is it all about when you are only somewhat curious and dont really care if you see it or not. It's even more important because QW doesnt promote itself. I could go on all night about the reasons why QW doesnt promote QW so i wont but the main points probably are that in the mind of an average gamer its outdated and dead or even unknown.

I dont think qw is hard to setup mainly because of equake but every fucking time i try to get someone to play qw and point them to equake there are some serious problems. Dont get me wrong the problem isnt equake(all hail empezar for it) its just always some random issues with cfg and cmdline or something like that.

just my 2 cents

yeah! lose the command line.. everything should be doable in-game

What Hafog wrote.

We could spread those stream url's on like every fucking game site and IRC channel there is - the game would only be one click away. YUMMIE!

After having had a chat with Zalon yesterday it doesn't seem like it's that big of a problem to get a thing like this going (i think he said it's already possible) but i guess the main problem would be the bandwidth issues.

How about make a nice miniQuake client, with a few menu options (mainly, graphic changing switches) and an exact instruction on how to connect to a qizmo to watch the game, it could even automate the spectating thing, as it really can be problematic (just find a nick that matches CAM and spec him in qizmo), that could interest some people I guess. Streaming real video is still a pain in the ass

procedure:
make a queue
[MALLOC] send pictures to the heap
refil the queue after the time..
write a nice kerneldriver which outputs whatever that's send into the queue in a infinitie loop while cat'ing it
use it with mplayer/mencoder or ffmpeg-server (this is the best program ever made, i've used it to broadcast 704x576/2000kbps videostream with my 100mbit pipe and my vhs camera) - and yes we want uncompressed data in the heap, since ffmpeg-server takes care of it anyway. a small delay on the sound is the only thing that is gay now. and guess what? Quakeworld itself support that so it's possible to grab directly from alsa
where is the developers anyway?

Would be nice to have something like this soon...the ideas on how to pull it off seems to be there, is someone working on it already perhaps?

Todiloo, any new thoughts or news on this?

put up a webcam filming your monitor :/