Mibbit IRC client video waterfall embedding works!

For all of you using the Mibbit client for IRC chatting (not the widget on a blog page, but the one what you get when pressing the "Clock for New Window" link above the widget) the news is, that you are now able to get the WinradHD waterfall window embedded inside the Mibbit client window!

In order to do that, just type the address "http://justin.tv/uvb76repeater" on a IRC chat window, and it will automatically convert it to a nice icon of monkey with a camera. Click on that icon, and voila!

This is how it looks:

Thats another one for using the Mibbit for IRC, besides its fascinating cross-browser compatibility and absence of flash nor java whatsoever (ok, the video part is flash, but thats inevitable with justinTV).

Some words about the waterfall streaming in general: Audio streaming seems to be lightyears ahead from the video streaming. It took me less than a hour to set up the audio feed and it has more or less worked ever since.

The WinradHD screen broadcast has taken two different streaming providers (after careful selection from about 10) and at least three different software setups after I can announce, that it is now theoretically stable (with an exception that it has a 2-second pause on every full hour when it is having a forced restart to work around of yet another bug).

What makes an unattended video streaming so difficult is associated with the fact that most, if not all, video broadcast services are aimed towards average Jane and Joe using their webcams. It has to be as simple and straightforward as possible and therefore all the streaming sites use flash plugins for broadcasting as default.

It works nicely most of the time, except the fact that the flash plugins universally seem to lack error recovery part on connection  loss. Therefore, on first glitch, the broadcast stops. Needless to say, you have to manually click on a "Broadcast" button again to restart it, what is pretty useless running unattended.

The only service apparently having some sort of API available was Justin.TV. They have developed a broadcaster application for Windows what takes VLC media player stream as a source and relays it to the website. Works nicely, but with two exceptions: It  still does not have the connection recovery part implemented as of version 0.41 and it has a nasty memory leak what slowly consumes all your memory over time.

Both shortcomings are handled at the moment with restarting the broadcaster automatically on every full hour, what introduces a 2-second interruption on video, but avoids trashing the memory and in case the connection was lost, gets it restored in one hour on worst case scenario.