Screen sharing with audio?

May 31, 2011 7:29 PM

Am looking for a screen share service that allows me to play audio live from my computer. (Any OS and any price will do.)

I need to walk clients through a presentation that shares the experience on my screen while streaming audio (that they need to hear) from a Pandora-like site. (And before you suggest it, the clients won't be able to login to the site themselves.)

posted by Dr. Fetish to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Does it need to be screen sharing, per se? Any video streaming software I've seen can take the desktop as a video input source and system audio as the audio source, and rebroadcast it as a RTP stream (or something similar), but that wouldn't have the element of system control. You'd have to add in VNC to get that.

As for specific software, I really like EvoLV on the Mac. Takes system video and audio as default input if you don't have a camera plugged in. Mac OS X has a VNC server built in too.
posted by supercres at 7:41 PM on May 31, 2011

Rereading your question, I'm not sure you want clients to have control over your computer-- you just want to show them what to do. Is that right? If so, "screencasting" is the keyword you want. If you want to walk them through it as you're on the phone with them, or whathaveyou, I guess it would be "live screencasting". EvoLV will do that, or you can record something, with voiceover and ahead of time, and just show that to people when they ask.
posted by supercres at 7:47 PM on May 31, 2011

How about uStream?
posted by msbutah at 7:52 PM on May 31, 2011

QuickTime Streaming Server or QuickTime Broadcaster will work. You'll need a computer that acts as the video and audio source. You export the video and audio to a second computer that runs the streaming server software, broadcasting your feed to clients.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:26 PM on May 31, 2011

We run a number of systems like Adobe Connect, WebEx, Elluminate, Wimba Classroom, Centra which are all servers that everyone connects to and offer screensharing, plus real-time audio, and video. Go To Meeting is another (I seem to recall that's WebEx really). Big Blue Button is another one. OpenMeetings, another. I also seem to recall that microsoft's chat client supports audio/video and screen sharing, but I haven't looked at it in a long while.

With all those options, I've noticed that consultants and external business people tend to use Webex fwiw.
posted by idb at 1:24 PM on June 1, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks so much everyone. Will try these options and report back next week.
posted by Dr. Fetish at 3:01 PM on June 1, 2011