[wellylug] Streaming Video

[Pete Black]

Real has encoders and server for linux, which will play back on linux, 
win, mac with RealPlayer. I have had some success with streaming Real 
but the cost for large deployments is high.

OpenDarwin Streaming Server runs on Linux and will stream quicktime or 
MPEG-4 but with quicktime you have trouble on Linux, and with MPEG-4 you 
have trouble on Windows.

VLC/VLS (VideoLAN) has crossplatform servers and clients but users will 
be required to install 3rd party software not just run Windows Media 
Player or whatever.

Windows Media Video Server etc. works pretty well on Windows and to some 
extent Linux (assuming you have the correct codecs), but you can't run 
the server on Linux AFAIK.

There really isn't a truly good solution for all this as far as I know - 
If VLS/VLC works for you I would say use that, otherwise the other 3 are 
probably as good as each other - Real tends to be a pain to get going, 
and the other 2 have a horrible omission of support on one or more of 
the 'Linux/MacOS/Windows' platform trinity.

Personally i just stick a bunch of MPEG-4 files in a folder and play 
them via smb or some other network filesystem. If you are encoding the 
file at the time, players like mplayer will keep playing as the file 
grows larger, but you do lose skip/seek functionality which is a little 
bit crap.

Hope that helps

-Pete








> Hey all..
>
> I am looking at streaming video over a network, and was wondering if 
> there is any opensource solutions out there for this..
>
> It would be nice if the streamed output could be on both Windows and 
> Linux machines, but would ideally like the server to be on linux..
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Cheers
>
>