How to do a live gamecast like on ESPN

MCSports wrote: I am interested in doing a live gamecast...something that ESPN does on their site.

Had a look at the ESPN stuff, is it live? I could find some Flash video of games but they all seemed to be past ones. Am probably not looking in the right places (at the right times if it's live).

There are a few solutions to streaming:

1. VLC looks good for streaming. The help has a good section on live streaming. It's pretty much just a case of running through a visual wizard.
2. Here's a howto for GNUMP3d also looks good for streaming. Bit harder to setup though, seems to require GNU/Linux and is setup via a web based interface.
3. If you're not doing live video you could convert your videos into flv files and use a Flash player. A free Flash video player is available. Just encode your videos as flv files and that player will play them (in a Youtube style).

Hope this helps, or at least points you in the right direction!

Oh I see, that doesn't look too difficult. You just need a simple administration interface so you can update scores etc. then build a nice interface to read what you enter into the database. AJAX could be used to update from the database, or just wait for the user to refresh their browser.

That ESPN interface looks like it took a lot of work, not to mention the time and effort required during a game to keep the facts and figures up-to-date. My advice is that you start off with just simple score updates: that's all people really need to know, extras can be built on later.

MCSports wrote: What would be a cool way to do the score updates?

Ummm, I don't know. Just start with something really simple that works. You update the score in the database, press F5 on the client machine and the score updates.

Start there, then when you have something working add spanglyness later. You could even add a little javascript magic to update the scores automatically, it'll be easier to just get something done in HTML first though. I expect if you do the basics you'll soon have some ideas of what to do next!