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RTSP Client For GNU/Linux Systems?
gilgongo writes: "The Arts Council of England are doing an interview with Richard Stallman for the CODE conference here in the UK, and we plan to stream an archive of it later that day. Stallman has stipulated that his interview must be able to be seen by GNU/Linux systems (i.e. just RealVideo is a no-no).
Our RealServer installation (running on RedHat 6.2) will do RTSP, so we assume that takes care of the protocol worries, but now we can't find any eaily obtained/installed clients to test it on. So - what do Linuxers use for seeing those streaming media clips with?" So with what tools would you most like to experience this interview? (And I hope streaming isn't the only option -- what's wrong with a nice downloadable version? Not everyone has a fast connection.)
If he's going to be so adament about this point, then ask him what you should use. Let him do the worrying about what format, encoder and decoder to use.
Also see if this means you can use the "RMS format" and Real for streaming.
If he was interested in whether the people interested in seeing it actually could, then it would be a no-brainer: he would use RealVideo. Because almost all people using GNU software are running Linux (and most of the rest are running Solaris) and those people have free-as-in-beer RealPlayers easily available to them.
But he's not interested in whether his target audience can see him.
He's interested in using this as an opportunity to make a political statement.
Which is fine.
But call it what it is. It's certainly not the pragmatic decision that you characterized it as.
Yeah, I don't have RealPlayer installed on the Linux partition on my home machine, I have to boot another OS on it to run RealPlayer...
...oh, wait, that other OS is FreeBSD, and it's running RealPlayer in Linux emulation.
(I'm not at home right now, so I don't remember which version of RP it is, but I think it was an RP 8 beta - which doesn't seem to have expired.)
Go to Real's home page, click on "RealPlayer" on the bar at the top listing "Download"s, click on "RealPlayer 8 Basic" from that page, and proceed from there. Various Linux versions are available.
Hmmm...I'd have to ask two questions with this. Are the people that really want to see you the ones you need to be convincing with a RMS video, or are the people that you need to be convinced the ones that will not be able to see your speach because its in some wierd format.
:-) The rest of my post is valid though...
Having said this, why not make it in multiple formats? My site just did a few interviews for a music conference in January (thanks Jonathan if yer reading) and it was decided that we'd go with multiple formats. We already had this in MPEG and then we converted a copy to Real.
The MPEG was very clean and fluid, but ended up being 25 megs. I've got a fast connection at home, but even mine isn't fast enough to stream 25 megs in 8 minutes, so it was set up as a downloadable. The Real file came out at just over a meg...enough to fit on a floppy if I even used them anymore. Even a slow connection should be able to stream this without too many glitches.
Something to think about. The requirements were that the GNU Only folks be able to watch this. In this case, they'd be able to watch it and have a copy clean enough for archival so they can burn it to VCD and pray to it at their Open Alter, while the rest of us simply download it and watch it on our Macs and WinPCs.
As a finaly note: ARGH!!!! Why would anyone want to run video from Linux??? Ya loose the beauty of the command line!!! If I want pretty graphics, I'll boot into my X Ready Powerbook. If I want a confusing GUI, I'll stop at my Windows machines!!! Ok, enough of my happy fun fun trolling effort
clif
The question was about client software that would meet RMS's requirements, aka be free software. The link you gave is to streamingserver.org which mainly has info on streaming servers. It does have a two links to clients, one is to a Java API, the other is to a non-free Mac client.
a ye r/
My google and freshmeat searches turn up
http://www.kom.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/kom-pl
http://freshmeat.net/projects/popcorn/
both can only handle mpeg1.
(And I hope streaming isn't the only option -- What's wrong with a nice downloadable version? Not everyone has a fast connection.)
I wholeheartedly agree. I never saw a benefit of (not live) streaming media, especially at home over a dial-up. I'd rather wait 10 minutes while a 2 minute video clip downloads than watch the horribly crap-ified streamed version of the same clip. The supposed benefits of streamed media (It doesn't take up space on your hard drive) are a mute point when the price and size of today's disk drives are taken into effect. So what's the benefit? Is it simply that the producers of said media want to controll its distribution? If so, well, its working: not only do I not re-distribute streaming media, I don't watch it myself.