A moment of VLC ZEN

Quicktime live streaming video set up, with windows media support.  Using a 256 kbit video stream (mp4v) and a 64 kbit audio stream (mp4a), using quick time broadcaster to stream to quicktime streaming server (open source) on the same local computer.   Once that is set up, the local QTSS relays to a dedicated server running Darwin Streaming Server (DSS) on FreeBSD.  The settings at the local computer accomplish the relay.

The relay settings receive a stream from the local non public IP address and then send that stream via relay to the dedicated server.  

Once on the dedicated server the client using quicktime can connect. You can embed the quicktime video into a webpage, but it requires the end user to have apple’s quicktime installed or if your using something like Linux a QT open source alternative.  Although quicktime has taken off with the success of the iPod, windows media is still installed on all modern MS systems.  So… why not just offer windows media as well.  Its possible… I’ve done it the hard, but cheap way using VLC. 

VLC is used to receive an rtsp connection from the (now local) dedicated server, transcodes the rtsp stream from quicktime into Microsoft Media Services (MMS), with ASFH to port 8080.   Heres the code…

vlc -vvv --intf dummy rtsp:yourDS.ip.goes.here/out.sdp --sout '#transcode{vcodec=DIV3,acodec=mp3,vb=300,ab=128,deinterlace}:standard{access=mmsh,mux=asfh,dst=your.tanscode.ip.here:8080}' 


Why include the first relay? The final product is an embedded quicktime / MMS stream available with an interactive chat.  At the point of low bandwidth, local computers my need to access the stream.  They will need to access the streams via the local DSS server, with VLC…. maybe. If these local computers attempted to receive the stream from the dedicated server, outside the local network, the stream to the dedicated server might crash.  

This compensates for the low bandwidth at the point of the local network.  If you want to offer both quicktime and windows media, you can without needing to support multiple streams. 

I’m currently working on a transcoding method for rtsp to rtmp. I’m exploring a few different open source libraries for inspiration. I’ve been working with ffmpeg with VLC, RED5 and ming.

I’ll keep everyone informed on what I learn.