Scanner madness

[Digital_ca]

I thought I would ask the awesome people here at Hak5 for some help.

I want to open a site that will offer locals a chance to hear the local cops etc on my scanner. This has been done over and over before. I want to do it a little different. The normal would be someone feeding either by shoutcast or using windows media encoder to capture sound and screen cap of the screen from the scanner control software.

Then they would upload it to some server on a rack running windows and it would be a go. Problem is windows media encoder is awe full slow and a memory hog on all sides. Myscanner is a bc780xlt so I can use this awesome software called proscan. Out of the box the program has a built in webserver and a server for a client program. The webserver will do very basic webpage with a link to a live streaming mp3. Its nice since its two clicks and your on. The client server allows you to serve for a client program that pretty much looks like a scanner and shows the channels and lets you log and record audio.

All of this is great if I had a high bandwidth connect at home but I dont. I can only serve a few clients and listeners before my connections goes south. I am trying to find a away to transfer the load to a real server.

So my questions are has anyone used proscan before? For those who want to look at it you can at proscan.org.

I can remote desktop into my local machine here but is there some hacking hawtness to remote in and run a client server type program and have the load on the network server side. So I log into my box at go daddy then on it I remote back to my local machine and startup proscan thn people can connect to godaddy via my .com and i am only supporting one upload.

Any help would be great!

John

[bobdole369]

Just so I understand - you want the audio feed to be local to you, and the world will be a "computer which can handle the load" in a datacenter.

It matters not this, as any way you look at it, you need the audio feed to come from your scanner out to "somewhere".

If the server program would support and use multicast, you essentially only send out one stream to the world, and everyone connects to that feed. Any server program worth its salt (shoutcast/WME, etc) already uses this.

So unless you really mean you want to host the containing web in the real world, there is no point.

[cooper]

Along with the webserver tab there's the ScanCast tab. On this you specify the (icecast2) server that you wish to stream to which will in turn carry the actual bandwidth load.

So, go find yourself an icecast server that wants to carry your stream (there are numerous Icecast resellers out there starting from $10 a month. I wouldn't count too much on finding a free one), configure your ProScan to transmit to it and voila.

[Digital_ca]

Just so I understand - you want the audio feed to be local to you, and the world will be a "computer which can handle the load" in a datacenter.

It matters not this, as any way you look at it, you need the audio feed to come from your scanner out to "somewhere".

If the server program would support and use multicast, you essentially only send out one stream to the world, and everyone connects to that feed. Any server program worth its salt (shoutcast/WME, etc) already uses this.

So unless you really mean you want to host the containing web in the real world, there is no point.

The simple mp3 is no issue I can send to a icecast or shoutcast server then add a link to my website at a data center.

Problem is 90% of the people want to see video tags as well so automatic that dumps shoutcast and icecast wont only work.

The old school was of doing it was using windows encoder on the local system and grab the audio and a screen capture showing the scanner channel. Then thats sent to the data center to my website thats running windows 2003 server and media server. Problem with that is the overhead on the computer isn't good and then when 100+ users are watching it the bandwidth is going to be killed fast.

now proscan offers a nice client people can download and its shocking low on cpu/bandwidth. The client uses only like 6 megs on the end users and 40 megs on my local server. much much cleaner looking. The problem is the client connects to my copy of proscan that sits locally. The server needs to be here to control the scanner and grab the feed. I have tested 10 people connected to me and it starts killing my local inet. I need to find a way to run it on rack at the data center.

I tried remote desktoping in from the data center computer into my local server which is whs. I couldn't even get the audio to bridge over yet alone use a client to connect. I need a way to figure out how I can colocation where the computer at the data center can run my apps on my local machine and and use my resources (com ports) etc. thats the issue.

I know this is a pain but I live in a bad fire area in nor cal. They same area that was in the news last summer so since there are many depts working and lack on info people need to see the channel thats broadcasting to know how local it is when pooh hits the fan and they bring 1500 ff here. most of this will be coming from my own pocket too lol.. thats why encoder isn't that great of a open since I running a v server and only have so much cpu/ram durning the fires last time the old scanner site had to borrow 5 servers to keep up with the 1500 + people.. No one so far in the scanner forums can think of a good idea so I bring it to the gods so to speak.

[bobdole369]

Hmmm, arrange with the datacenter to place teh scanner at the POP on the shelf with the machine? webcam to the scanner face?

[metatron]

http://www.bctool.org/ ftw, grab the beta for the server stuff

Features

Key features of bcTool

* Freeware

* Programming support for all Uniden DMA scanners

* One simple application to manage all of your scanners

* Automated logging in two formats for quick reference

* Intelligent, multi-format recording with full customisation

* Advanced recording features to provide unattended scanning, logging and recording

* Complete 'remote control' of your scanner using Radio Control feature

* Macros to automate regular tasks on your scanner using Radio Control

* Completely configure your scanner settings (broadcast screens, searches, weather, global lockouts etc) using bcTool

* Fast visibility of last scanner activity and current scanner activity

* Import your programming files from other popular scanner software

* Progam searching and duplicate removal

* Automatic duplex calculator for calculating mobile/base channels automatically (user customisable, ships with UK and US data files)

* RadioReference.com Subscription Database support

* Works under WINE on Linux and *BSD!

Server

* Coming Soon: bcTool Server

* Provides full bcTool functionality and audio streaming over the internet

* Set up your own audio streams so others can listen to your scanner

* Allow friends to control and use your scanner

* Allow others to program your scanner for you remotely

* bcTool Server is currently in development, please join the Yahoo! Group to participate in testing!

[Digital_ca]

Hmmm, arrange with the datacenter to place teh scanner at the POP on the shelf with the machine? webcam to the scanner face?

Problem with that is the datacenter is 100's of miles away and no way they could get my local area.

[Digital_ca]

http://www.bctool.org/ ftw, grab the beta for the server stuff

Features

Key features of bcTool

* Freeware

* Programming support for all Uniden DMA scanners

* One simple application to manage all of your scanners

* Automated logging in two formats for quick reference

* Intelligent, multi-format recording with full customisation

* Advanced recording features to provide unattended scanning, logging and recording

* Complete 'remote control' of your scanner using Radio Control feature

* Macros to automate regular tasks on your scanner using Radio Control

* Completely configure your scanner settings (broadcast screens, searches, weather, global lockouts etc) using bcTool

* Fast visibility of last scanner activity and current scanner activity

* Import your programming files from other popular scanner software

* Progam searching and duplicate removal

* Automatic duplex calculator for calculating mobile/base channels automatically (user customisable, ships with UK and US data files)

* RadioReference.com Subscription Database support

* Works under WINE on Linux and *BSD!

Server

* Coming Soon: bcTool Server

* Provides full bcTool functionality and audio streaming over the internet

* Set up your own audio streams so others can listen to your scanner

* Allow friends to control and use your scanner

* Allow others to program your scanner for you remotely

* bcTool Server is currently in development, please join the Yahoo! Group to participate in testing!

I checked it out but pretty muchthe same as proscan and it doesn't interface with my scanner which is odd. But thank you.

Maybe I figured it would be easy to get a v server running win sever 2003 to connect to my win server 2003 and be able to use its com ports and audio. I can run it in remote desk top from my v server but even the audio for some reason wasnt passing.