This is all hypothetical, and its related to something I am doing for my school (we are trying to start a video production class) but I need some questions answered.
I have figured out myself how to set up a streaming system that has the capability to stream to just about any service, as well as the local network. We want to use LAN streaming to save internet bandwidth at the school. If my streaming system (MXlight and a BlackMagic ATEM TVS) can output to a .ts file, which can be played by VLC media player, is there a flash or HTML5 alternative to VLC? I want all the computers in the school to be able to watch the stream, and they don't all have VLC. Im wondering if there is a web player that I can embed into a local web server, and have the web player be responsible for showing the video to the client. Basically I need a flash based (or possibly HTML5) video player that I can put on a page and tell it to play the stream from the .ts file. This way, clients just go to an address and the stream plays in the browser, without them having to do anything special with their computer, as long as they have Flash (all of them do). Is there a player that can do this, or a better solution using MXlight with another protocol maybe?
Thanks,
I'm new to large scale video distribution so bear with me here
Just food for thought but if you want it to be streamed on a local network, and I assume your using win7 and since this is a school I will also assume the computers are networked together in a homegroup-like way, then could you not use Windows Media Player to stream from one PC to another? I am positive file sharing and music can be used this way without bogging down a network but I am curious to see if it supports video playback as well. Let me know if I need to clarify more on this (I'm not the best at explaining things). Best of luck!
Thats a great idea, but there is one problem. We have several teachers (as sad as this is) that are still using XP on their machines and we also have a few Macbooks kicking around here. I know you can stream with media player, but we've used a vBrick to stream with Windows Media before and it was a NIGHTMARE. That stupid thing was the whole reason that I went and scoured the internet thinking "THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY!" it was the worst $15,000 I think the county has ever spent. I got a decade old machine with a USB capture card, Linux, and uStream working 1000x more effectively and more reliably than the vBrick. So anyway thats my rant on vBricks.
Thank you for the suggestion though. We are considering just installing VLC on every computer (a lot of them have it already) and using that to decode the .ts file that MXlight streams. I was just wondering if anyone had a better way that could run in Flash inside a browser (we have a local Windows DNS server if that helps anything, its also a domain controller I believe)
A TS file is usually a generic container. It could be H.264 w/ MP3 or AAC or anything. VLC starts to lose performance when streaming as a server to many computers.
You could try combining Red5 Media Server and Flowplayer with RTMP (flash in the browser). I'm sure it's been done before, as they suggest that server of Flowplayer's page. RTMP can be used for both live streams and basic media streaming (with buffering).
Flowplayer Live Stream Demo: http://demos.flowplayer.org/basics/live.html
Okay, that seems like a good option or at least a start for us. How much bandwidth do you think we would need to stream 480p to 40-50 LAN machines? Would we need 100mbps, 1gbps, or even something as crazy as link aggregation? Bear in mind we are somewhat limited as far as networking, at least for the time being, as we are working with some very old Cisco switches that are running out of ports FAST. The county IT people are supposedly pulling out all the core switches and APs and starting over next summer though, so we may be able to achieve gigabit then. For now if we wanted gigabit there would have to be some kind of voodoo dark magic since (as far as I know) the core switches are only 10/100.
Hi, I just met with the IT person from the county today. He basically gave the green light on everything, including my streaming idea, as long as we use multicast where possible so as to not hog a ton of bandwidth. I know with MXlight you can stream directly to VLC with UDP multicast, but is there a way to stream to flowplayer with multicast? We are going to have 100+ computers viewing this stream locally, so we NEED multicast or we will be using an insane amount of bandwidth. Worst case, we can just stream to VLC on every computer, but we would like to make it easier for the teachers by just creating a local webpage. Is there some way we can rig FlowPlayer to support multicast so that we don't bombard the streaming server with requests? I know it will do live streaming but I didn't know if this was possible. We would be using Apache for the web server if that matters, and the IT people are being awesome and giving us free reign over the Linux boxes, so I can expirement if I need to.