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Live Streaming Video?
emmons asks: "I've recently been put in charge of creating a live streaming audio/video solution for a website. I've looked around and it appears that there are two popular options: Real and Windows Media. I haven't found anything else. I don't really like either of those because Real is expensive and Windows Media is, well, Microsoft. Are there any other options?"
Run Sorenson Broadcaster on a Mac to capture and encode the stream, and then stream it using the Darwin Streaming Server (from Apple) on Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X, and maybe others.
I've been playing with their Darwin Streaming Server on a Linux box and it performs alright and it's free.
g /
http://publicsource.apple.com/projects/streamin
Pork is not a verb
Whatever happened to the MBone? I was never technically associated with it, but I did play with it while I was working at a major ISP/Internet backbone, and it was a great idea. But any web sites you find on it these days are either gone or terribly outdated.
Fuck 'im up, Tim! His views are invalid! -Pirate Corp$
Not using a piece of software just because it is from Microsoft just shows ignorance. Use what works. Evaluate windows media before you bust on it. I use it, and it does streaming pretty well.
Not only does it run on NT, Linux, Solaris, Free BSD and anything else you decide to compile it for....
its open source.
Oh, and did i mention that its free?
I mean - what else could you want (other than Linux clients with Sorenson)
Click here to go to the website
(i'm not biased, i just know 3 guys that work in QTSS)
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
...unfortunately it isn't yet. :)
.MOV creator, it shouldn't cost anything! And the Quicktime player can stream very well. So, maybe that's the best way?
The problem is that it doesn't have its own streamable file format. AVI files are the standard MPEG4 transport format, but you can't stream them because AVI files have headers at the very end of the stream.
Quicktime MOV files can have MPEG4 embedded in them, and can be streamed, but I don't know of the legal issues involved in that. I'd imagine that if you used a free codec, and a free
The Darwin Streaming Server is in my opinion, the best possible solution. Quicktime has the best quality and is the nicest looking. DSS is opensource, and "is based on the same code as Apple's QuickTime Streaming Server. It is available at http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/streaming for FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows NT and of course Darwin/Mac OS X. The source can also be downloaded from the above URL.
Remember if you go with Windows Media you'll block all the Linux users (not sure about Mac) out! The only alternative I can see, that everyone's already pointed out, is Quicktime, but again it'll lose all us Linux users. This is one of the lacking things I miss about Windows. Oh well.
-antipop
You can download a free 'evaluation' version of RealServer that can serve up to 20 simultaneous streams of live or pre-recorded audio or video, and AFAICT is not feature-limited. I'm using it to serve record and CD clips on this site and it has worked really well.
If you grow beyond that, the next step up costs $2495, which handles up to 60 concurrent streams, IIRC.
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its not linux compatible. Its yet another attempt to lock competitors out with proprietary formats, and then either immediately or eventually stop supporting their platform...
SSL Certificate
You'll need to re-compress that video into a smaller format (unless you have one heck of a network). I don't know why NetMeeting doesn't support it; do you have a VfW capture driver for it? If so, any stream broadcasting app should work.
Darwin Streaming Server is the free and open source version of QuickTime Streaming Server. It runs on FreeBSD, WinNT, Solaris, RedHat and Mac OS X Server. To do real-time encoding, add Sorenson Broadcaster. It's not free, but it's only $199 no matter how many streams you want to serve. You'll need a fast Mac to run it.
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
Well, the Quicktime Streaming Server is, at anyrate. It's part of the Darwin project: get the skinny here. Runs just spiffy on Linux, or so I'm told.
The QT client has a freebie version that runs on MacOS and Windows, but, alack, no younicks client yet.
SoupIsGood Food
5{o be possible to use vic or the Java Media Framework with the H.263 codec instead of Sorenson Broadcaster.
Otherwise, for MP3 straming, it works great.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Looks like the first part of my post got mangled, I said "It might be possible to use..."
There is a project being run out of Cornell University called the qVIX project. Its aim is to provide real-time, high quality video/audio to users. The algorithim is something very new called CU30 which is a full-frame rate, high quality, real-time video codec. The qVIX application and CU30 codec are GPL'ed and can be found at http://cu30.sourceforge.net.
Couldn't some form of an applet on the client side handle this? Sure, it couldn't be very big images, but I would think it would be possible. You might have to come up with some custom streaming format, or use one currently available. I would imagine it depends on what you are trying to stream (a talking head, or an advertisement, or something else), to determine what kind of quality you want in the end. I think it would be possible though to write some server code and a java applet that could handle it all (though only at a low to medium quality).
I thought I remember seeing this done a long while back, when applets were everywhere, Real was just starting out, and streaming video was still an "idea" for later...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
some people are slamming you for preferring not to use MS, but as others have posted it looks like either the 1 yr/20 stream realplayer eval or the QT/Darwin solution will do what you need.
What a shame those people are slamming you for wanting a choice...maybe all microsoft people should be forced to drive a yugo and live in a tent until they sign a statement that they now understand the meaning of the word "choice".
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
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While I doubt it is free, you might look at ClipStream, which is a Java based streaming system (so it can be done - now, is there an open source solution, and better yet, GPL'd?)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
http://www.the-labs.com/Video/m atik.tu-chemnitz.de/~jan/MPEG/MP EG_Play.html
http://rnvs.infor
http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~chasan/ (this guy supposedly had a Java player, but it isn't there anymore)
And of course:
http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/index.html
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I worked for a company that made a fairly serious investment in streaming video and live encoding - the musticast-enabled their network (v.useful for live netcasting), we distributed a number of server around the country and placed them in the ISP's dial-up POPs. And we opted for Windows media for a number of reasons - - Something like 98% of our users were on the windows platform. - the server is 'free' with win NT/ win2000 You need to pay for the server OS license, but you don't pay per stream like you do with real. It is effectively an unlimited licence. - The quality is great - media player supports a bunch of codecs, and if you use something exotic, the client's player will go fetch the codec and plug it in, transparently. It is possible to pick your codecs independantly for audio and video, and really tweak them for performance. For example, you would pick one setup for fast-paced, live sports footage, and a different one for an interview where the audio is more important. - The encoding tools are free and good. Really free - you can download them without purchasing anything. - Fully multi-threaded, and supports multiple processors and multiple capture boards in one machine. Go for a beefy dual-proc machine with 4 Osprey 1000's in it, and you have a live encoding dream machine. - dead easy to set up ISDN lines, and bonded dialup channels etc for your upstream path in a live encoding setup. We usually used a cisco 1600 with an isdn dialup to allow multiple machines to connect and encode, but you can also just use a connection directly from the machine. I could probably go on - in short, Windows media player and encoder tools are just about the best things I've seen MS build apart from their keyboards and joysticks. The only drawback I found was that to start and stop the services and do other general admin you would have to use something like PC anywhere to get onto the servers. And I hate using a gui over a dial-up. Tim
A search of RealNetworks on slashdot turns up a lot of articles on RealNetworks' violations of privacy. They also sued Streambox under the DMCA, for reverse engineering their file formats and circumventing their "protection against piracy".
And their player bombards you with ads and annoying popups (e.g. please register your personal information with us so we can send you Exciting Product Offerings). It feels like they care more about their corporate associates than the consumer.
Microsoft has also had bad business practices, but then again, they've had a lot more opportunity to. Real, OTOH, doesn't have as much influence, but has been as sleazy as it could. I shudder to think of what RealNetworks would do if it were in MS's position.
A license for Real is around $20,000 for 400 connections. It's expensive. Real works very well on Linux though. There is a free RTSP server for linux, do a search on freshmeat for it. I don't know how you would create the video though, I'm sure it's in their FAQ.
Window Media server is free with win2k advanced server, but it's windows, and it won't handle nearly the traffic that the linux box with realserver will handle (8000 connections per processor).
The DivX code was just opensourced (not the shitty Circuit City DivX, the MPEG-4 like codec). I think this will eventually support streaming.
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I've done a lot of work in this area. Here's what I think:
Rule 1: don't use real. They have very good audio codecs, but the video stuff isn't worth it because you have to pay for everything.
If you are looking for quality, go with Windows Media. Get a Quad processor beast with an Osprey 500 and serve live MPEG 4. All the software is free if you don't count the operating systam costs.
If you want an Open Source solution use Vic with Darwin Streaming Server I think an Osprey 200 is your best bet for a capture card, but I haven't actually tried this out yet. Note that this uses the H263 codec which isn't much to talk about. If you want to use sorenson codec to stream live to quicktime, well good luck. There's something called LiveIce but it costs 6 grand and it only runs on NT, but you might want to look into that.
Here's some good links to get you going:
Choosing a Streaming Video Technology
previous slashdot article
technical primer on rt*p protocols
QuickTime is easily the best quality, and there's no price-per-stream. You can run the QuickTime Streaming Server on Mac OS X, Darwin, or Linux. QuickTime 5 also has some new buffering features that make so much sense, you won't believe that Real and MS don't have them.
Live Delivery
There's videoclipstream, a Java streaming video solution, here.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
> Not using a piece of software just because it is
> from Microsoft just shows ignorance. Use what
> works.
No, it's not ignorance. Software is not a one-time purchase. If this guy sets up MS-based streaming video, he's estabilishing a relationship with Microsoft. Even if the MS solution has more features or is cheaper, you have to consider whose promises you're attempting to believe. Microsoft also has no multimedia savvy. Windows Media is ugly stuff to people who know better. It's unfun, and live streaming video ought to be fun.
I would go with QuickTime, myself, for the following reasons:
highest quality available
free, open source server software that runs on Darwin, Linux, NT, and Mac OS X, with NO per-stream cost
easy authoring features that will enable you to put a Flash front-end, titles, or links into your streams
integration with video authoring software
a player that's popular, easy to use, and unclutterd by blinking ads
Apple owns a big piece of Akamai.
Also, you can get a Mac with DVD-R, FireWire, and gigabit ethernet built-in as your broadcaster, and make a DVD after the live event is over, as well as create a DVD-ROM of the raw data, all on the same machine (and all the software is included). The other machines you involve (usually one or two more) can be Linux or NT if you like. With the money you save by having no per-stream cost, the machines are basically free, anyway.
They have the "surestream" thing which scales stream quality up or down depending on user connection. You can point a user at one URL (and one file on the back end) with multiple bitrate encodings and the server/player will deal. Real has had a bug in their server for several months. It keeps causes the server to start using 100% cpu for no reason. We have not been able to get a single realserver instance to handle more than around 500 streams (on more than heafy enough hardware) without it getting really pissed at us over time. It took alot of bitch slapping, but real finally admitted they have the bug. So don't believe any numbers like one server on one monster box will handle 3000 users. Real will tell you memory usage per user and users per cpu mips. But we ended up running enough realserver instances across enough linux boxes to keep each instance below 300 users (a fuzzy happiness level we found). Hey real, if you've fixed the bug already, doh. Guess you should've told me, eh?
Also, check into mixing stereo streams with mono streams in one surestream file. Mono is actually better sounding than stereo below like 30kbps. But above that roughly, you want stereo. But realproducer won't let you mix and match all combinations of everything you'd want.
I bought Sorenson Broadcaster and used QTSS to deliver live AUDIO of our universities athletic events. A few month's later, the President of the U.S. picked our campus to deliver one of his last major addresses. HAD to try a video webcast. It came off well, with reports from across the country reporting it worked great.
Real offers a free server, but only to get you hooked. Once you become successful, you'll have to purchase expensive licenses.
QuickTime Player is a great choice for users of either major platform. It has a super-easy installer. As already mentioned, the QTSS is free in various incarnations.
Keep in mind that streaming LIVE is different from streaming archived events. You'll be using RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) instead of HTTP. That can cause problems for people behind firewalls that aren't configured to let the stream in.
I highly recommend "QuickTime for the Web". Here's a sample chapter from Apple's site.
Broadcaster is great and you can download a fully functional 30 day demo. I swear, if you want to do live video, you really should get a FireWire equipped Mac, plug in your video camera and run Sorenson Broadcaster. If you want to improve on reality, play with the free copy of iMovie to create your archive files. You would have to be insane to spend money for the hardware and software necessary to do the same stuff on another platform.
Curious George.
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
The most economical and flexible hardware solution is a dual processor G4 combined with a DV camera. Accompany this by Sorenson Broadcaster and Sorenson Video 2.1 Developer addition and you have an extremely powerful and cheap streaming server. This will work for multicast streaming, if you want to use other methods, combine it with a QTSS running under Linux or OS X Server running as a reflector. The developer edition of Sorenson Video is important to provide Altivec and multiple processor support. Additionally, your investment in this equipment will make it easy to move to MPEG4 (not MS-MPEG4) when Sorenson releases their software codec. Sorenson recently demoed their beta MPEG4 at the Macworld Expo. Yes, you will be initially investing in a more proprietary solution to begin with, but at least it will be expandable to more open standards later on, less than one could say for solutions from Real and MS. Graham
I just set up a QuickTime Streaming Server 3 preview install on an OS X public beta machine, and have had great luck with it so far for intranet streaming. Plus, it's FREE. check it out. -Nick
Who cares if the QuickTime server runs on Linux? You still can't watch any modern Quicktime movies on Linux because there is no player. It's the players that matter.
It's really irritating to hear the ``me too'' crew keep claiming that there is Linux support for QuickTime. There is none that matters.
It is unfortunately the case that RealVideo is the only cross-platform video format that is deployable today. It is unfortunate both because both QuickTime and Windows Media have dramatically better video quality, and also because Real's pricing model is extortionate.
You can get a crippled demo version of the encoder and server for cheap/free, but here's what the licensing prices for RealServer Pro look like, if you're actually using it:
200 viewers: $12,000
400 viewers: $22,000
1000 viewers: $40,000
2000 viewers: $80,000
And that's for a single version of the server, with no future upgrades or support. If you want upgrades and support, add 40%.
This library uses bits of Wine so that it can load Windows-native en-/de-coder DLLs
Sounds like DivX ;-)
But where does the end user get the license to use the DLLs? From a copy of Windows. The WiMP EULA is tied to the Windows license; its "Supplemental EULA" (also used for IE) states, in effect, "If you are not a licensed user of Microsoft Windows 95, Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, Microsoft Windows NT, or Microsoft Windows 2000, you have no rights under this EULA."
Running the DLLs on Alpha, Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC, or any other platform supported by NetBSD or GNU/Linux will be dog slow because it must go through an x86 emulation layer.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, I would submit that this is a completely rational descision. It doesn't matter if they make a better product or not, the truth is the company has a history of sucking people in killing the competition, and making them pay and pay and pay. Getting trapped in a Microsoft solution is a bad business descision.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
$man microsoft
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Try this one
$man microsoft
Crowded elevator smell different to midget. -Chinese Proverb
Microsoft research has employed and currently employs numerous gods in the world of graphics and multimedia. Graphics gods like Jim Blinn. Realtime gods like Michael Abrash. You can check out all the various research groups, the people involved, and what they do here.
Windows Media is ugly stuff to people who know better. It's unfun, and live streaming video ought to be fun.
Perhaps I'm not one of the people who "knows better", but fun-ness seems like a pretty poor criterion for a critical evaluation of a streaming media product. Clever skins can kiss my ass. Windows Media is pretty decent as far as I'm concerned. MS has put a lot of time and money into crushing Real Networks, and we're beginning to see the fruits of that.
You want lowest common denominator? Use Sun's JMF... Your video can be played back natively on Solaris, Windows, Linux, but most importantly, any platform with Java support can use the Java based player... The users needn't know that 3 second pause was them downloading the player :-). Now THAT is a video stream that reaches everyone!
I know streaming is suited to this particular application (live video), but I urge anyone looking at doing streaming media to avoid Real. For the damage they've done to my online experience they deserve a plague of festering boils, but I'll setting for them never getting another customer.
</rant>
buy or appropriate a superior technology [in this case as standard such as MPEG4]
what tech did MS buy to make IE better then netscape?
maybe good coders?
-Jon
Streamripper
this is my sig.
Check out a recent issue of Linux Journal. A streaming medium is just dying to come out of Ogg Vorbis combined with FIASCO. Pure open source and pretty hot technology. In fact, done well, you'd be looking at a top contender against QT, Real and Media Play. Did I metion open source? Some pieces need to be created though: Integrating FIASCO with Vorbis into the Ogg wrapper, determine how it will be streamed and code some plug-ins. Not such a bad open source project - give me three good programmers and 6 months... then watch out!
:T:R:A:N:S:
Now, regarding video quality. RealVideo 8 is quite good, and in every comparison I've seen, does better than the competition. Of course, I'm a RealNetworks employee, so I'm prone to bias. Still, here's the link to comparitive data on the RealNetworks site, as well as an independent assessment which largely comes to the same conclusions (with some nods to the competition). And, yes, there's a Linux version
As far as server price goes....hey, we've gotta make a living somehow. For the bandwidth necessary to stream to the audiences that you quote, you're going to pay a lot more in bandwidth and infrastructure than in software licenses.
So, can we get a little slack here? :)
Rob
It's great that this "graphics god", Jim Blinn has a home page on microsoft.com, one of the largest companies in the world, a company with a vested interest in seeing people use ever more complex hardware & software....
:)
... and he doesn't use anything on that page that would be unfamiliar to the first version of Mosaic
... has a lot of solutions _almost_ ready for streaming. Notice the enphasis on "almost".
:-)
They have a quicktime/mpeg player for linux, a library to read and write quicktime format files, and a low-bitrate MPEG encoder, not compatible with MediaPlayer (i.e. noone wrote a codec for it, at least until now).
And the fact their address is http://heroines.sourceforge.net should tell you something about the license(s) they use...
I'm not sure about streaming support, but given the library and the quicktime standard, I'd say this should be easy to implement.
If you have the option of paying some developers to write some code, maybe this could be a solution (you'll need a MS WMP codec based on MPEG 2-movie and libmpeg2)
Ciao,
Roberto.
AniToolBox! An Open Source animation program!
If the Real license is $20.000 per 400 connections, it's irrelevant if it suports more connections per processor, since for $20.000 I can buy a *hell* of a lot of processors.
Personnaly I would rather pay for hardware than software (that's what got me into linux in the first place). I Windows media has a better compression, quality and price (nill) than It's illogical to think about anything else.
I love Linux and use it every day, but don't forget the golden rule of engineering: "the right tool for the right job"
...
Yes, I know I ramble and my spelling isn't quite up to scratch. If you wish to complain,
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Real's servers cost serious money for more than a dozen or so streams, but then again so does the bandwidth for those streams. Do the math and figure out how much connectivity you'll be paying for at your co-lo facility. Surely you don't plan to do high-volume streaming over a single T1 to your office.
Next, do you need good quality across North America? Maybe you need to mirror on both coasts. Need to go beyond North America, or have increased reliability? Then you'll probably need to do sign on with Akamai.
No, the server licenses are just the beginning. Unless you're only talking about a few low-bandwidth streams, in which case you can use the free or cheap Real servers.
So make your server platform decision based on what OSes you need to support clients on, and how bad it would be for your business model to require a player many people don't already have (i.e. Quicktime 4 or above). If you're counting on visitors who aren't paying you directly, you should probably limit your choices to Real and WIndows Media.
Anyway, why run your own servers at all? Why buy the hardware and bandwidth if you can just outsource your hosting to a company that already has fiber, giant servers and a contract with Akamai? Do you have login and tracking issues that video hosting services can't support?
I find it a bit odd to find a single post thanking someone for pointing out the silliness of supporting the quicktime version since it doesn't support linux, while providing a link to the unix versions of realplayer: the full version is not avaialble, and what *is* available is "community supported"--whatever that means . . .
for a version that works under load?
And if it exists, would someone *please* tell cnn?
:)
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak