Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the States! This time of year usually means lots of travel, and often it's impossible to be everywhere that you want to. Thankfully, good quality DV camcorders, machines with fast processors, and broadband Internet speeds can allow us to enjoy a much higher quality video experience than what most people equate to a "webcam". It's easy to broadcast in fairly high quality using the free Windows Media Encoder. This walkthrough uses version 9 to deliver good quality point-to-point video, limited mostly by the upload speed on your Internet connection. If you have at least 500 kbps up, you can get a very nice 480x360 window size at 25 fps (European cameras) or 29.97 frames per second (US / Japanese / Australian cams). Pretty much whatever the video looks like on a television is what will be seen on the other side. There will be about an 8 second delay in both audio and video, but altogether it's quite usable.
First, you need to have Windows XP SP2 that includes the msdv.sys driver. There used to be a KB article with a download to get this for XP SP1, but it looks like it has been pulled from Microsoft's site. So either this or Vista is required.
Second, you need to have the Windows Media Encoder 9. There is an i386 version, and an x64 version to choose from.
With all of this installed, all you have to do is attach an average DV camcorder via firewire and turn it on. The computer should recognize the appearance of the device on the IEEE 1394 port, and bring up this notification:
If it doesn't then you can always run Windows Media Encoder directly at this point. As you create a new session, here are the steps of the wizard that you'll need to step through:
With that you'll end up broadcasting the stream from that specific system on port 8080 (or whatever port you chose).
You can test out your connection by surfing to mms://localhost:8080. The MMS part stands for "Multimedia Messaging Service", and will bring up Media Player and connect to the stream being served.
If you have a NAT out to the Internet (from a firewalled Internet connection for instance) then you'll have to set up port forwarding for the specific IP address of the system that's broadcasting. It should then show up as whatever IP address you've gotten from your ISP. You can find out what this is by surfing to this page from the system that's broadcasting:
Find my IP!
So with that information, just have your friend across the Internet use any Windows XP machine with Windows Media 9 or later installed, and have them surf to this URL:
mms://#.#.#.#:8080
(Where #.#.#.# is the IP address that you found from above.) That's all there is to it! In a few moments the video stream will be fully buffered, and start presenting. Have fun!