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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?"
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 But any web sites you find on it these days are either gone or terribly outdated.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.
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
..., but you can't stream them because AVI files have headers at the very end of the stream.
Shouldn't those be footers then?
Otherwise, for MP3 straming, it works great.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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
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 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
There's videoclipstream, a Java streaming video solution, here.
> 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.
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%.
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
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>
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
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?