Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
All these people posting about how Microsoft WMP formats are not supported in Linux should check out the AVIfile library. This library uses bits of Wine so that it can load Windows-native en-/de-coder DLLs to play/encode ASF/AVI files under Linux (or any other platform Wine supports). I don't know if it supports streaming yet, but since it's a library, you should be able to write an app around it that handles the stream connection.
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
> 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.
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%.
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!
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