Wendell: cross-platform UDP multicast streaming in browser?

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1

Hi Wendell, (and Logan, Qain, Pistol, and everyone else at TekSyndicate)

My school is building a broadcasting class/studio thing, and we are using streaming over IP to broadcast to the school. We are using a BlackMagic ATEM TVS and a Core 2 Quad machine with MXlight for the streaming. I know we can stream with UDP multicast if the client PCs have something like VLC installed, but ideally we don't want to have to help all the teachers set this up. We are going to stream to YouTube as well so that the public internet can see it, but we want to do only local streaming at the school. Is there a video player (preferably HTML5, but Flash is good too) that runs in a browser and can accept UDP multicast streams? I know we could use VLC's web plugin, or maybe an ASX file for WMP, but that's not exactly cross-platform *glare towards the teachers that have MacBooks*

Thanks, if it matters I was planning on using WordPress to build the local site so we could do some news/blog feed with it, but we can use anything if need be, the server we are hosting it on is a Core 2 Quad machine with a gigabit NIC and Debian with the LAMP stack on it.

2

Also, in case I wasn't clear, the two Core 2 Quad machines in this are seperate. We have one for the video mixer control and the actual streaming, and one as a web server.

3

VLC is a pretty easy way out here.

Probably you can make a shortcut (.lnk) with some command line parameters and be all set. e.g. 

vlc -vvv udp:@192.168.whatever


4

Okay, does the VLC command line work on Windows/Mac without any changes? I guess I'd have to change the extension for Mac but that's pretty simple. Also, is there a way to get this to work on iPads/iPods? (we have the...honor...if thats what you want to call it, of having a class set of those)

5

Also, is there a way to easily deploy VLC to a couple hundred Windows PCs on an AD domain? I believe our school's server is running Server 2008 R2 if that matters.

6

do some experiments :)

There is a "portable" version of VLC that is meant to run from a flash drive. That'd probably work great here. you could distribute VLC + the batch file or shortcut.

 

7

Okay, thanks! One more thing, I am new to multicast, I was just told by the county IT people to "make sure your video streaming setup will allow us to use multicast" so I did. I've since read about how multicast works, but I am still not quite sure, does it work across multiple subnets without any hacky mess, or is it like broadcast where you have to set up an IGMP proxy and all that? (I don't have to figure this out, the deal was the central office IT people did this part, I'm just curious :P)

8

You could automate alot through Group Policy. There is a Group Policy that you could use to copy the file to the local computer, and then you could see if there is a command to silently install the application, if so then you would do as Wendell says and add that argument, and attach the script to run at startup or user login. 

As far as the multicast goes, someone correct me if I am wrong, it communicates on that subnet, but you could add routes in place or change the subnet on a central server to encompass the other subnets so the other subnets could communicate with the central server, but not other subnets. Personally I would add routes.

9

Yeah, we already have routes, the school just has their wireless clients and their wired clients on seperate VLANs so I wanted to make sure that wasn't a problem. I'm going to try and test some stuff with a Windows 7 VM and Group Policy this weekend, but I have finals next week so that's kind of second priority :P

Thanks for the help Wendell/pacman!