node.js ko

Screamcasts

Screamcasts

by dickinabox

39.04

overall

Steampunk video streaming

Screamcasts allows you to use your webcam to produce and share embeddable-realtime-streamed-retro GIF's. 

Skype + Instagram + Chatroulette = AWESOME

All of this powered by the latest GIF 89a technology from 1987.

Judging Instructions

To broadcast you'll need a browser that supports getUserMedia. We recommend Chrome 21 or newer.

To visualize the broadcasted GIFs you have some more options.

GIF bleeding edge technology is supported only by the following browsers: 

- Netscape (>2)
- Internet Explorer (>1)
- Mozilla Firefox (>1)
- Chrome (>1 but chrome is sometimes unresponsive)
- Safari (>1)
- Opera (>1)

If you are stuck using Mosaic or Lynx we strongly recommend you to try a newer browser for a better experience.

Who

How

On the client side:

We built a GIF encoder based on Matthew Flickinger's amazing articles.

We also used a hex to base64 converter and a color quantization module to reduce the color to something GIFs can handle.

Any client can open a broadcasted GIF to view the webcam stream in real time. The broadcaster must have a browser supporting the latest HTML5 webcam APIs.

On the server side:

Our only dependencies are Express and Socket.io. We built node.js code to encode and stream GIFs from the broadcaster's webcam.