[wellylug] Streaming Video

[Pete Black]

Chris,

further to that email, i just tried VLC out to see how it works these 
days, and it seems to be a reasonable solution for LAN-speed streaming.

I was able to simply click the 'File->Wizard' entry on VLC, selected 
http and MPEG-TS options, pointed it at one of my mencoder-ripped AVI 
files, and was able to play it across the network via http on another 
machine, easy as pie.

Don't know how well it will scale, or whether the bandwidth requirements 
will fit your actual use-case, but it seems pretty nice as a place to start.

-Pete


> 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
>>
>>
>
>