Wow, that is everything I need to know. Right now all I need is staged
content delivery from files, but, in the future, I'm sure I'll be needing
this info for live streaming.

Thanks

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 12:17 PM, David Kaiser <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Paul,
>
> I've been researching something very similar for my church the past two
> weeks.  I am assuming you want to do real-time or "live" streaming?
> (Or maybe I misunderstood and you just want staged content delivery from
> files?)
>
> For live streaming, you essentially need 2 systems, the one that you run
> locally is the "broadcaster" or "streamer" setup, where you have
> camera or other source, etc. plugged into a computer, and it streams it
> out to a site on the internet that is a "reflector".
>
> For the reflector, you can either use existing services or stand up your
> own with a commercial or open-source server solution.
>
> The existing reflector services include sites such as justin.tv,
> ustream.tv, livestream, and it is rumored that youtube will be offering
> a streaming service in the future.
>
> The existing proprietary reflector server applications include Apple
> Distributed Streaming Server, Adobe Flash Media Server, as well as other
> has-beens products like RealNetworks helix or any Microsoft offering.
>
> Essentially the Adobe one is the best architecture.  The best existing
> open-source reflectors such as red5 and erlyvideo are compatible with
> the Adobe stream formats.
>
> For the broadcasting application:  In the proprietary realm, you would
> use Apple Quicktime Broadcaster (only runs on Mac or Windows) and stream
> RTSP protocol to one of the reflectors, OR you would run Adobe Flash
> Live Media Encoder (only runs on Mac or Windows) to stream RTMP to one
> of the reflectors.  They do pretty much the same thing - grab the video
> source, encode it (H.264 for video, and AAC for audio) then package it
> inside a protocol (RTSP for Apple, RTMP for Adobe) and then stream it to
> the reflector.
>
> For open source broadcaster solutions, you need to look at building a
> solution with a couple different components.  For grabbing the video and
> encoding it, use ffmpeg or vlc, they run on your broadcast pushing
> machine, and you somehow have to grab your video source from the camera,
> encode the video to H.264, the audio to AAC, and then you need to find a
> way to wrap it into RTSP or RTMP protocol an push it up to the
> reflector.  There are some documented solutions for this on the red5 or
> erlyvideo.org sites, but you will need to tweak quite a bit to get them
> to work.
>
> For an open-source reflector, there is red5, which is written in Java,
> and there is Erlyvideo.org, which is written in Erlang.  They both allow
> you to stream live content from a single source, and then you deploy
> Flash applet video viewers on a web page that connect to the reflector
> and view the output streams.
>
> One of the main advantages of switching to the self-hosted open-source
> reflectors is that the "free" sites such as justin.tv, ustream or
> livestream require you to use their viewer applet, and unless you pay
> for their commercial level of service (can be from $100 to $350 per
> month) they periodically cover the bottom 20% of your video picture with
> advertising.
>
> We've tried using their unpaid service, and we've had issues with
> people seeing ads (on top of our church broadcast) that are for either
> other churches buy ads with our church keywords, or people buying
> anti-church ads with our church keywords.  By running our own reflector
> and using an open-source viewer applet - we can control all the content
> and don't have to deal with other people's advertising.
>
> I've been playing with using Apple Quicktime Broadcaster to stream to
> both Red5 and Erlyvideo reflector running on Centos5, and the stream
> would never properly be initialized and work.
>
> I have had better success using Adobe Flash Live Media Encoder.  I've
> used it with both the red5 and erlyvideo reflectors.  Erlyvideo uses
> less CPU so should scale much better than the Java-based red5, but it is
> much more work to install and configure.  I had to install git, pull the
> latest Erlang runtime source code, compile and install Erlang from
> source, and then use git to pull and compile the Erlyvideo application.
> I've sunk at least 100 hours into setting up Erlyvideo so far, and
> still don't have it tuned to production level (for us, that's 100
> viewers for 90 minutes with no interruptions.)
>
>
> For the viewer web applet, you should look at either FlowPlayer (Gnu GPL)
> or JWPlayer - which are both Flash based players.  You just drop them
> into the HTML, set the properties to connect to your reflector and tune
> in to the RTMP stream.
>
> With some careful work, (and quite a bit of it) you can go almost 100%
> open-source with this solution.  The video grabbing, the mpeg (h.264 and
> aac) encoding, the streaming, the reflecting and the flash-based viewer
> applet can all be open-source and all work on Linux.  The only component
> that you might be non-open-source would be the Flash runtime, and this
> may even work with gnash instead of the real Flash product (i haven't
> tested with Gnash I keep the Adobe runtime on my  Ubuntu machine)
>
> Ok, now you know everything I know about this - good luck and let me know
> when you get it working.
>
> If I get the ffmpeg or vlc broadcasting from Linux camera source up to
> the erlyvideo reflector working, I'll demo at a future LUG meeting.
>
> Thanks,
> DK
>
>
>
> On 9/22/2010, "Paul Saenz" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >I am looking for a video web hosting solution. It is for a church, so they
> >don't have a lot of money.
> >I realize that you get what you pay for, so if they want something cheep,
> >then it may lack in reliability,
> >bandwidth, and/or some other aspect. Nevertheless, if someone has a
> >suggestion of some service that
> >may be affordable (exactly what affordable means, I cannot say at this
> >point) then it would be greatly
> >appreciated. If you offer a suggestion, then please note what aspect of
> >service may be lacking. Bandwidth
> >is not a issue at this point. If anyone on the list provides this type of
> >service, please contact me offlist.
> >I am helping this church pro bono, but I never haggle over price. If
> someone
> >has a service, then they name
> >their price. So I won't be trying to bring someone's price down because
> it's
> >a church. This is still America Right?
> >
> >Thanks
> >Paul
> _______________________________________________
> LinuxUsers mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
>
_______________________________________________
LinuxUsers mailing list
[email protected]
http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers

Reply via email to