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Media Streaming for Dummies?
Jon writes "Back in grade school, one of the things I helped the school set up/run was a in-school broadcasting system based on a few simple switches that went between a HyperCard stack with cool animations and the kids that would tell the news for the day. It's a great way to get kids involved in school, and my mother who is now a principal at another school is wanting to get something similar set up again. However, they don't have cable outlets in all the classrooms, and so I've been pondering streaming the content over their network. All the rooms are running Mac OS X. So, I turn here to Slashdot to ask, if you had 26 classrooms how would you approach the problem of getting video to them in an inexpensive way?"
videolan supports multicasting and VLC player is available for osX
is this what you're looking for?
http://www.videolan.org/
The VideoLAN project targets multimedia streaming of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels and live videos on a high-bandwidth IPv4 or IPv6 network in unicast or multicast under many OSes. VideoLAN also features a cross-platform multimedia player, VLC, which can be used to read the stream from the network or display video read locally on the computer under all GNU/Linux flavours, all BSD flavours, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, QNX, Familiar Linux...
VideoLAN is free software, and is released under the GNU General Public License. It started as a student project at the French École Centrale Paris but is now a worldwide project with developers from 20 countries.
More information about the VideoLAN streaming solution be found in the streaming section.
QuickTime streaming server. Free. LINK. Should be pretty easy.
First non-VideoLan post?
Ron Paul 2012
Media Streaming for Dummies? Television!
I can testify that VideoLAN works great with Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther", in fact on a G4, it works better than the stupid DVD Player that Apple includes by default. The important part is the G4 processor, it seems, since the G3 doesn't have the AltiVec stuff that is needed for fast video. G3s can do it, they just have to work a lot harder.
Would this do it?
e r/
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/broadcast
How about "not at all".
Why doesn't your school consider that new concept "teaching" rather than "watching tv"?
I can see it now. You set up a "streaming server" for 26 classrooms (a SMALL school). The teachers, administrators, students spend so much time getting their 'content' and 'hard hitting news' ready that the whole thing about 'teaching' and 'learning' are pushed aside.
Plus, how much money are you spending on all this technology that would be better spent on (a) books and (b) paying teachers a decent wage?
If the clients are all OS X there is a pretty good chance there are some OS X servers in the building. Turn on the Quicktime server and install Quicktime Broadcaster on a client machine. Plug the camera into the client and you can broadcast through out the school.
If your content is on VHS tape use a media converter to send the content to Quicktime Broadcaster (or edit it into Quicktime and put it on the server).
What, me worry?
Use a web server (OS X has simple personal web sharing) and Flash (or LiveMotion, if you prefer it). It'll save stress on your school network, and it's easy to create crisp-looking presentations.
I've hacked the Tivo to do streaming, but can't currently watch the streams on an OS X box. Which is a shame, because that's exactly where I'd like to watch them from.
All help or comments appreciated. Well, within Slashdot norms obviously...
Cheers,
Ian
I know I'm opening myself up to criticism here, but since a tech guy isn't going to be running the show, windows media encoder may be the way to go. You can create a 'stream settings' file, drop it on their desktop and they can begin streaming by simply opening it. It's free, streams all kinds of video and can even do complex stuff like shuffling through a power point presentation - which sounds kind of what you'd like to do. It handles my little fishcam without problems :).
Well, two things. 1) Some kid generally creates the animation, which in turn makes him/her learn how to do that, and 2) The kids read the news to be able to broadcast it.
;)
Interactive learning is the best way to go. Not only do kids hear the news from their peers, they also get to participate in sharing the news, as well as helping out with the process behind the broadcast, as minimal as it may be. The days of using text books only while having a teacher lecture are over!
As the OP, I just wanted to thank everyone. I did google for this, but I couldn't get the right combination of keywords -- too many people sell "live video streaming."
QuickTime broadcaster looks like exactly what is needed for this job.
Thanks again everyone. Sorry for being too easy
Definately Darwin (QuickTime) Streaming server. Not only can you use it to take video directly, but you can set up other stations to broadcast a single stream to many clients. Sort of like a mainframe with middleware then clients, this solution is great if you have an older network or have bandwidth concerns.
t reami ng/
DSS/QTSS is extremely easy to use- it is controled via a web browser. Apple even included functionality to drag and drop between different parts of the streaming server website, something i've never seen anyone do.
go to:
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/s
to download the free version (it has the same functionality as the normal version). While you're at it, you should get a license of QuickTime Pro so you can hint and screw around with the bandwidth of static video files.
Information about downloading is found by scrolling down the page. Have fun :)
There's a world outside the U.S.?
Really, how hard would it be to string some coax to each room and plug in a TV?
Dang, and here I thought the first post would be about quicktime streaming server. Oh and remember people, QTSS is OPEN SOURCE. That's right, Apple has a fair number of OSS products, fortunately most of them tie back into the OS so it's great for them. But enjoy working with Quicktime, I'm glad Apple keeps the tech advancing. The player could use an overhaul but the underlying tech is amazing.
I did this once with some Sorenson software. I think they called the base the reflector or something like that. This was pre-X, maybe OS9 days or earlier. It worked well though. I want to do this very thing too. Not all of my college football team games are broadcast in my folks' rural area. They are however broadcast in the town I live in. Both of us have DSL so I'm thinking about streaming it to them from here.
I love all the people here who are saying 'Use QuickTime Streaming Server (or Darwin Streaming Server)!' Most or all of whom have never done what the person is asking about, I suspect.
t er/) and QTSS together. Once you have them, though, things just work, fairly seamlessly. And you can (and by default do) transmit good-quality standard MPEG-4, which can be read by any MPEG-4 player. Or you can choose any other codec, and the stream can still be read by any player that supports RTP/RTSP. (Which are, of course, open standards.)
It sure sounds to me like they want a live-compression-and-broadcasting tool. QTSS only broadcasts hinted movies (movies that have been prepared for broadcast by QuickTime Pro or one of the other tools designed to do that). It can't take in a video source and broadcast video out the back end.
For that you need QuickTime Broadcaster (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/broadcas
And it's all free. And it's really easy to set up.
Check it out. It's sweet.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I lie, it looks like you don't even need QTSS for that size audience. QTB can probably do it, unless you're looking for a really high-res stream. I've never tried it that way, though, for more than one client at a time, though.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
The MediaMVP works excellent and all you have to produce is a mpeg-1 or mpeg-2 video. It can handle all the way up DVD quality to boot. The only downside is that it only comes with windows server software but people are working on versions for linux which should be able to be recompiled for mac.