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Media Streaming for Dummies?

Posted by timothy on from the what-no-floppy-drives dept.

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?"

3 of 41 comments (clear)

  1. easy: VLC by denthijs · · Score: 5, Informative

    videolan supports multicasting and VLC player is available for osX

  2. VideoLAN by rixdaffy · · Score: 5, Informative


    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.

  3. No question by mkiwi · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    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/st reami ng/

    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.