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A technical curiosity
12 years ago
I find myself wondering about this whole streaming thing, and the first thing that needs to be figured out I suppose would be the necessary memory to use a webcam. I use an emachines S3649 computer with the following specs:
AMD sempron LE-1250
Nvidia GeForce 6100
160GB hard drive
1GB DDR2 dual channel memory
If I recall correctly I had asked on a stream once if this met the requirement of 1GB RAM that all webcams I've seen need at bare minimum and getting no as an answer. Along with this I'm sure there are plenty of other memory requirements for running livestream and for(ideally) recording my streams so that I could wtach them later or others who have conflicting schedules could see them at their leisure.
AMD sempron LE-1250
Nvidia GeForce 6100
160GB hard drive
1GB DDR2 dual channel memory
If I recall correctly I had asked on a stream once if this met the requirement of 1GB RAM that all webcams I've seen need at bare minimum and getting no as an answer. Along with this I'm sure there are plenty of other memory requirements for running livestream and for(ideally) recording my streams so that I could wtach them later or others who have conflicting schedules could see them at their leisure.
why not give it a go and see what happens?
this might answer your question. :3
I'm guessing, from what I read there, that you can upgrade to 4 GB RAM, but your operating system will see only 3 GB if it's 32-bit.
you'll still have way more than the minimum RAM needed for webcam operations. :3
if you're curious as to what system type you have, and if you're running Windows (Vista or later),
you should be able to find out by right-clicking "My Computer" and selecting "Properties" from the menu that appears.
it'll mention either "32-bit Operating System" or "64-bit Operating System" next to "System Type".
As for recording your streams for people to watch later, most streaming services provide that ability, and it's done on their server, not your computer, so it doesn't take any extra memory to do so.
I'm not sure about the minimum requirements to stream, but I think you're fine. I imagine any streaming software you download will have a corresponding "Help" page that tells you the minimum requirements, though.
I tried the same on mom's dual core laptop and it was too painful to do anything.
It eats up a lot of mem right from the get-go. Even if it could manage, you couldn't do anything else. You'd have to close every possible program or it'd spike. It uses anywhere from 1 to 2g of ram, consistently. And this doesn't count the memory needed for the browser (and OS) to function.
You'd have better luck just recording yourself on tape than stream with Ol' Trusty Rusty. haha
The only thing I could see is if you use super low settings like 240 x 320 resolution, no sound, and a key frame rate of like.. 10 /s.
But I dunno. I've been on justin.tv, ustream and livestream. They're all pretty much the same.
In retrospective, my quad-core amd is today's 'low/mid range' pc and I bought it custom (gaming pc) two years ago. It can play Skyrim on max settings, but streams still hiccup here n there. Even the settings I use now (480 x 640 res, sound, 30kfps) are on the low end of livestream's software. It's like streaming is a luxury ahahaha