I want to stream a video recording live with my Canon Vixia HFM41 camcorder to my Windows laptop

[G+_Steven Kaplan]

I want to stream a video recording live with my Canon Vixia HFM41 camcorder to my Windows laptop. What additional hardware do I need to do this? (My laptop is about four years old and the processor is not too fast and it only has 4 gigs of RAM).Thanks!

[G+_Wolf 68k]

You want to play something that's on the camera on the laptop?

The manual covers the different ways of doing this. If the video on a SDcard you can plug it into the laptop. If your laptop doesn't have a card reader, they are pretty cheap and easy to get. There is also steps for using an Eye-fi card. I would also think if there is a USB port, likely micro-USB, you can connect it to the laptop that way.

[G+_Steven Kaplan]

I want to live stream what is being recorded by my camcorder in real time to YouTube or another site, so friends can see a live music performance.

[G+_Brent Vrieze]

I was just watching a KH episode this morning talking about that very thing. Check back about 4-5 episodes.

[G+_Steven Kaplan]

Yes....and then stream it live on YouTube or other platform. I think I need some hardware to encode the output from the camcorder and send it to the computer for transmission.

[G+_Ben Reese]

It looks like your camera doesn't have HDMI out, so you'll only get SD video on the live view. For music, audio is more important than video anyhow.

 

This is what I use at church currently and it has near 0 latency.

Diamond VC500 USB 2.0 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000VM60I8/

 

Beyond that.... Vmix, OBS, XSplit... Any should work for your actual live stream.

amazon.com - Robot Check

[G+_Ben Reese]

I've been able to stream with a Core2Duo laptop with Windows 7 - as long as there's not much else going on. Typically I use an older (2nd Gen?) Core i5 laptop though. As a general rule, you'll need about 2 Mbps upload bandwidth for a consistent stream - though 1.5 Mbps might be ok. YouTube recommends I think 600~1500 kbps on the encoding for a 480p stream. I use vmix + FFMPEG with video set to 750 Kbps and audio is currently set at 120 Kbps (96 Kbps is default and OK, but I still think audio is important).

 

If you have an external mic (or mixer) that will connect to your laptop you will probably get better audio than from your camera.