First of all, we are in Brazil, where our "high-speed internet" isn't so high speed.
It's not just Brazil that has that problem. Even in the USA my 'high speed' is only 512K. And that's only recently. I was still on 56K dialup for a very long time. I sure wish I lived in Europe some times. :lol:
The application is for college-level instruction via internet. We have a seminary in Sao Paulo that will broadcast a 3 hour class via internet to several different cities in Brazil. Initially, we will only be a receiving point, but we hope to also broadcast from here (Porto Alegre) in the future.
So what we need is the ability to receive a good quality "talking head" image that can be enlarged with a video projector
Okay, as a reciever, you shouldn't need much of anything. Unless you're recieving an Mpeg4/DivX/etc. highly-compressed stream (which generally isn't done) you wouldn't even need anything over a 500MHz P3 for a smooth stream decoding. (And that's at high quality. A low quality stream could be done on a Pentium 133MHz.)
What you really need to know there is what encoding your video stream is coming in as. Typically things are done either as MPEG1 or 2, or as MJPEG. And usually they're done in either NTSC or PAL, quite often as low as 1/4 NTSC or PAL to conserve bandwidth. These are all super easy for PCs to handle. So again, reception should be no problem unless you've got a really rare high-quality feed going.
And just about any 800x600 (maybe even 640x480) VGA projector should do fine for putting it up on a big screen. No special video card should be needed for that.
and eventually to broadcast a good quality image. Since the broadcast will go to several different cities, we will probably use some sort of internet hosting service to help increase the quality of our stream.
Okay, to transmit you'll probably need a bit more CPU horsepower because doing the compression always takes more than doing decompression. But again, using normal video feeds, this shouldn't be a concern. Any modern PC could do it without a problem. But again, there are so many options here depending on how professional you want to get. A simple USB webcam might be enough. Or you could go as pro as a camcorder with a DV connection over Firewire if you like to zoom, pan, or add special fade outs.
Or, a possibly cheaper solution is to skip the DV quality and just use an old (or cheap) camcorder with its video out line run into a VIVO video card's line in. (Even my old GeForce4 Ti 4200 could do that.)
But if your number of recievers is limited, you might just be better off using something like an Axis or Sony network camera. (Well, there are other brands too, but I trust those two companies. I'm currently testing out an Axis 211 and a Sony SNC-CS3N at work with a custom microscope lens.) The network camera not only records the video, but compresses and streams it over a network like a computer. Just plug them in, plug in the network cable, and that's it. They'll typically have a web-browser-based interface so that clients can connect directly to the camera's stream over a network. (And an administrator can connect in this way to make settings changes.) Just set up the camera's IP address to be available to the www like you would with any other server and you've got a nice cheap and simple stream setup. Their prices vary by what options you need (like zoom lens, panning, audio, number of simultaneous clients, etc.), but they're usually pretty affordable. And they're small, so you can, for example, just mount the camera in a classroom's corner and once it's all set up you can pretty much forget that it's even there.
But anyway, to reiterate, video stream reception can be done by just about any old PC. And the hardware you need for transmission really depends on the quality of broadcasting that you plan to do and if you're going to just leave it stationary or actually have someone play with the camera in real time.
*edit: Another big thing to consider when transmitting a stream is the software you use. I think there's a freeware project to set up a PC like a Real video webserver. Otherwise there's more limited softwares like Netmeeting and some instant messengers and junk. :? I don't know too much about what good software is available for streaming a video from a camera. I never found any good software for this when I last looked. That was what got me to try using a network camera, because it broadcasts the video for you, so you don't need any special software to transmit.