My partner and I have a webcam site that basically runs the old-school method....Every 0.5 seconds the javascript reloads the image in the browser from the webcam. However we are wanting to upgrade to a streaming media server to get higher quality video, and possibly audio. We aren't tied to any one specific file format or server type, as of right now we are leaning towards slicehost (as scalability is important), and installing darwin streaming server or wowza.
This is meant to be a live stream. Does anyone have any suggestions for hosts/server software?
Wowza is great and they offer an Amazon EC2 setup with micro pricing to make it affordable.
You can always go with Flash Media Server, but that is expensive.
Red5 is free and open source.
UPDATE
Based on your comment, you can also use UStream. It is free and will hook into Flash Encoder, which is also free.
Do you absolutely have to stand up your own streaming server? Services like LiveStream can do what you're talking about for much cheaper than setting up your own hardware.
Related
1) I'm researching the technology I can use for a browser applicaton that streams video. It should capture video from webcam and push it to service where it's stored and can be watched later. One of the (possible?) options is Azure Media Services. But after a quick look at the documentation it seems that it's not possible to use pure modern browser without plugins. Am I correct? If no, can you please give some links to github projects or an example of code to look at?
2) Another possible technology option is Amazon Kinesis Video Streams (looks lite the best solution I came up with so far), but maybe you can recommend some other cloud services?
Thanks!
Currently the short answer is no.
WebRTC is the right solution for broadcasting from a browser. That's the only protocol for live streaming that will be "somewhat" widely supported in modern browsers like latest Chrome.
AMS does not yet support receiving WebRTC. We only support RTMP and Smooth ingest right now (Chunked MP4)
As far as I'm aware, Kinesis also expects you to send chunked MKV (like chunked MP4 but a less popular container format), which would need a browser plugin or javascript library to support. I don't see any Producer library from them in Javascript.
WebRTC is your answer - but to catch that in the cloud, you may need to look at other solutions that run in an Azure Container. There are a bunch of 3rd party solutions out there for WebRTC.
I'd like to Stream my Servers Desktop and make it public via example.com/stream
The Stream should include both Video and Audio.
The Server is Win 2008 using zwamp for Apache etc.
As of the Player, anything goes. I was thinking about Flowplayer.
Is there any easy step by step tutorial?
Every Tutorial I found was not really made for my scenario.
If there is any Tutorial which will definitely work for me, please feel free to point me towards it.
Much appreciated!
You could do this by downloading Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder, and do a "screen broadcast", where your server's desktop will be broadcasted. You could get the streaming link to your server's desktop once you start Windows Media Encoder.
Hope this helps.
I'm looking for a video streaming soluiton which has the ability to upload the video files to the server and deliver to multiple receivers on-demand across the hardware and software platforms (Desktop, Tablet, Mobile, Windows, Android, iOS, etc.). The solution should also support streaming live videos.
Can HTML-5 used as client for the above requirements? IF so, what should be the server side streaming solution? Any feedback and alternatives will be very helpful.
Appreciate it.
You may look at MediaMosa, it is a backend that handles video management. You may create your own application on the front-end.
I'm interested if there any web server application that allows you to stream HD quality live chat without software application installed on streaming client PC. Flash Media Server allows HD streaming but it must be encoded prior to that which makes impossible to work with as any streaming client will need to install and handle their encoding software.
Thanks
I'm not sure what you mean about the installation of software. Naturally you will need to encode your video before it can be streamed, and the client needs some piece of software to play it. That can be software that is already present of course, like Flash or Silverlight.
You might want to look at IIS Smooth Streaming. It should be able to handle HD quality streaming very well (there's a demo on the site).
Are there any open source projects in any language and other recourses that I need to look at in order to implement flv to 3gp conversion? It's better to be streaming, I mean return first portion of 3gp before last portion of flv is downloaded.
Or are there any similar services already implemented - my goal is to have something like
http://converter.org?source=sourceUrl.flv&targetFormat=3gp that I can feed to 3gp player, in my case - on iPhone, and not wait until server downloads entire flv.
UPDATE: ffmpeg does really good job here, just
ffmpeg -i input.flv output.mp4
and that's it. But output file can be used only after conversion is done. Streaming is still an open question. There is ffserver that does some sort of streaming but I could not make it work.
I'm not sure if it is possible, but if there's one thing that should do it.
it's http://www.ffmpeg.org/ ..
it can convert anything to anything on an online platform. don't know if it supports streaming but definitely the best solution for online video conversion
Well this one might be a little late to the party but to stream video online you'll need a Media Streaming Server to deliver the video over a specific streaming protocol (i.e. HTTP,HTTPS,RTSP,RTMP). I've also been looking for such a "real-time" transcoding service but the closest thing I've found so far is the Video CDN's which are quite pricy, and also limited in formats/support. What would be really nice is for one of the media servers to add in a real-time transcoding feature. At the time of this writing no such service exists that I know of.
The top 10 most popular options for Media Streaming Servers are (IMHO):
VideoLAN - VLC Media Player (good for quick tests and proof-of-concept)
Kaltura - Open Source video platform
Real Media - Helix Universal Streaming Server (may be best bet for 3GP over RTSP)
Apple - Darwin Streaming Server / Quicktime (Live) Broadcaster (best for iPhone/iPad)
Red5 - Open Source Flash Streaming Server
Adobe - Flash Streaming Server
Wowza - Media Server
FluMotion - Open Source Multimedia Streaming
Microsoft - Windows Media Server (AVI, WMV, Silverlight & other formats)
FreeCast - An OGG Theoris (video) and OGG (audio) streaming/conversion platform
As you can see there are many options for streaming and you can start as simply as hosting the video on the same server and delivering to Desktop computer browsers via HTTP (the easiest way to get started with this is trial & error). Each offers different features in terms of protocols supported and transcoding, but none are truly real-time as you mention where you could feed in a source video and get an output video in the format of you choosing (i.e. 3GP). My personal choice would be to start with VLC for small-scale tests on a home network, since it is basically a swiss-army knife for desktop video that can also act as a server for any of the formats it can playback (though it may be more complicated to get this to stream to the public internet and even harder to go all the way to a single device on a private carrier network, some info is available from people who've tried):
http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=45782
Some basic transcoding instructions to go to MP4 (required for iPhone/iPad/iPods):
http://wiki.videolan.org/MPEG-4
I also agree about FFMPEG being by far the best solution for video conversion, as it also supports 3GP and you can at least start playing around with conversion on your own test server, you might want to try the following PHP Classes project:
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/5977-PHP-Manipulate-video-files-using-the-ffmpeg-program.html
In my experience that was an excellent contribution to speed web interaction with FFMPEG's mostly command-line and sometimes clunky interface. Who knows, maybe you'll build the first real-time transcoding service, I'd be the first to signup as a customer and/or as a contributor to help you on that!