Hi Ted, I have a bit of experience as I've just set up a system to stream mp4 video files, and other hinted media.
1. The best advice I can give is to use VLC media player as the client. It is pretty good, and when included as a plug-in for Mozilla firefox, it's pretty darn good. Check out http://vlc.revolunet.com/ for examples - I used the ext.us example for eye-candy value. 2. Where I set this system up, it was very important for us to maintain open standards to avoid vendor lock-in. What is vogue today (cough, cough, flash) may not be tomorrow (cough, cough, HTML5). So we convert everything using mencoder on gentoo to mp4. What you're after is a hinted media file. Hints are a section at the header of the media file that tell the browser/decoder what timeslot is at what byte offset. When VBR encoded files are streamed, offsets are damn hard (impossible?) to calculate - so the whole file must be downloaded then parsed until the correct time offset when skipping. But if you're client is brain-dead, there is no telling what it will do. 3. I needed to stream the file from a php script to control a few things dynamically and found this code to be of great use: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/14757 Apache + VLC + script + mp4(with hints) = SWEEEET Good luck, Rob p.s. if you're deploying streaming with VLC over https, don't forget to put the root certificates in the correct folder. There is little / no doco on this. <snip /> Please consider the environment - do you really need to print this email? -----Original Message----- From: Ted Byers [mailto:r.ted.by...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, 11 December 2009 6:55 AM To: users@httpd.apache.org Subject: [us...@httpd] http video streaming Presently running Apache's httpd v 2.2.9 on Windows Server (and also on XP, but my tests in question were run on the server). I have attempted to get httpd video streaming working by making a wvx file pointing at the video file I want to stream. When I then point my browser at it, the dialog asking to open media player appears, and when I click ok, th eplayer opens immediately, but it waits until the entire file (a WMV file) has been transferred, showing the progress of its being buffered by the player, before it actually plays the file. Perhaps I am misinformed, but I thought streaming video would start immediately. What did I miss? Does the wmv file need to be constructed in a particular way? Does a special module need to be added before http streamed video works as I'd expected? The thing is that I am attempting to reduce the time between when a user clicks a link to our video and the time when it starts to play and I don't see a benefit between the way this streaming is behaving and my original option (make the video and deploy it to a fast host that has good bandwith), which has the video opening on my workstation in just under 20 seconds. So, while my test works in the sense I do see the video eventually, I see no improvement because the client waits until the entire file has been transfered before playing it. Can this be improved using only the httpd server or do I have to resort to either Adobe's streaming video server or Apple's streaming video server and buy tools to convert ASF or WMV or mpg files into flash or quicktime files? Thanks Ted -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/http-video-streaming-tp26733531p26733531.html Sent from the Apache HTTP Server - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@httpd.apache.org " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscr...@httpd.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@httpd.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- The official User-To-User support forum of the Apache HTTP Server Project. See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html> for more info. To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@httpd.apache.org " from the digest: users-digest-unsubscr...@httpd.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@httpd.apache.org
