Metropol

I know this isn't 10 years ago but I have the need to stream some internal CCTV to our external extranet, whats the best software you use/used to do this. I was going to go with Webcam XP but I've found the video feed crashes every 30mins or so for no reason I can tell..

I'd like to be able to view 4 cameras independantly but am yet to find an affordable card/usb that can do this, so for now have 1 video stream which has a timed video switcher before it reaches the PC.

Windows Media Encoder is free and pretty reliable for streaming video / audio, as is VLC (more fiddly to set up, but can be viewed in things other than Windows Media Player). However, both are unicast, so the bandwidth required goes up for each client which connected. WME can stream to a Windows Media Server (part of the Server OS's) to reduce the amount of bandwidth required from the encoder.

You could create something using a 4 way CCTV multiplexer of ebay to get all four cameras into the PC. I've also found some pretty cheap 8 way capture cards (like this one) on eBay and set them up as seperate streams in WME / VLC.