I thought my camera supported h.264 encoding, when I originally started investigating how to live stream. It’s the video format required by most streaming hosting services for live streaming. However it turns out that the NetCam SC only supports MJPEG, so I’ve been looking for a way to transcode MJPEG into h.264, and haven’t been very successful at it. Since the camera also has a BNC video out connection, I got an Axis M7001 video encoder which is a small dedicated device that will take the video from a BNC connection and encode it to h.264. So that’s what I have running right now. The video quality isn’t quite as good as I want, but I think it’s good enough for my needs at the moment. I also signed up with click2stream.com. It seems like a pretty bare-bones service, but the plans are reasonable and it works well as far as I can tell.

I think if I had it to do over again, I might go with an Axis camera, since they offer several models with h.264 support out of the box, and other features I like. But, I’m happy with the quality of the StarDot NetCam I have, and considering the investment I’ve made in it at this point, I’m sure I’ll have it running for several years!