[Annotated for the Technically Inclined]
I’m planning on going to Blockparty this year at notacon, and I’d like to take my Capped service to the next level.
Blockparty is a demoparty, one of the few [only?] demoparties in the USA. [Most of the Demoscene is located over the pond] I’ve been wanting to help the party by providing a live stream of it via Capped, like Demoscene.tv does for major parties in the UK.
Now the problem is, Capped just downloads and plays existing videos. Getting the a Flash player like Capped to play a live stream would be difficult. Flash does support live streams, the issue is providing a stream that it can read.
There are very few programs that can stream live video to Flash, one being Flash Media Streaming Server, from Adobe [the makers of Flash (now anyway)]. The server itself is free, but is limited to 10 connects at a time. To raise that limit, it requires a licence key [which can cost up to $1,000 USD depending on the licence you get].
Being on a budget of $0, I kept looking. I remembered about VLC - a open source media player and media multi-tool. As it turns out, VLC supports streaming in FLV format. [FLV = Flash's Video Format] Bingo! However, that support is in alpha stages, and is only avalible on the CVS repository [basicly that means it's not ment for public use yet]. Not only that, but after getting a build of it, it seems you can’t yet control the video bitrate for FLV on VLC. [Which basicly means, large video is large, would take a while for it to load for the end user, then throughout the video would sit and "buffer" the next segment] It’s a awfully silly thing to exclude bitrate changing.
My tests on my home computer were fairly successful with VLC never the less, that is, AFTER I set the isLive param on the FLV player object in flash (without it, the flash player eats ram like nuts till it crashes). Online, however, it doesn’t seem to work at all, in flash format or others, I suspect the build of VLC I got may have a bug with streaming.
So at the moment, I still don’t have what I need the most - a streaming server. On the other hand, I have the resources to power a live feed [servers, capture card, powerful desktop for encoding, etc], so I could still do it without flash.
If I can’t find anything, I’ll have to go to my backup plan - Windows Media. I already have all the tools for that.
More on this post later, just thought it’d be nice to update once in a while.
More Resources:
- http://www.on2.com/index.php?391
- http://www.wowzamedia.com/index.html
- http://osflash.org/red5 <- looks promising.
