OS2 World Community Forum

Public Discussions => General Discussion => Topic started by: Martin Iturbide on August 11, 2014, 06:31:32 pm

Title: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Martin Iturbide on August 11, 2014, 06:31:32 pm
I will like to discuss the idea of Audio/Video live streaming on Events.  I want that "on-premise" events had more online presence and for people that is not able to be on that events can also be there in some kind of way.

Even that I will like this for WarpStock and other meeting, I'm not discussing it to be implemented on any of the events now. So I hope this do not create any false hopes. This is just to give ideas to the possibilities.

So, we all know that OS/2 is limited on the Video Streaming area, so putting the ego aside, I'm considering all platforms I know.

And I want to discuss the possibilities.

Option 1) UStream and Android.  The most easy thing.
To have someone with an Android phone and UStream sharing the content on the UStream portal.

Advantages:
1) It is easy as hell to configure and requires little hardware.

Disadvantages:
1) An Android phone is not a camera and to not get tired it needs a tripod. Can you get a phone tripod?
2) The audio and presentation that shows up may not be a nice/sharp for the online viewer. Also any demo from OS/2 showing will had to be phone recording the projector screen.
3) The online viewer requires Flash. I haven't see an option to watch UStream on VLC for example... but it will be good to take a look.


Please, if anybody has experience with Audio/Video streaming on OS/2 or other platforms please post your ideas.

Regards
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Martin Iturbide on August 11, 2014, 06:47:24 pm
Option B - Video Operator

The other idea is to have something a little more professional (without being complete pro) that has a machine that can be operated to switch between two cameras, 1)The speaker, 2)The presentation showing on the projector.

This main machine that will stream its content to the Internet will have the Camera and the Microphone as inputs. And will have an additional machine that will be its camera 2 (the computer showing content on the monitor).

Which software can be used for this?
Option 1) - UStream Producer (windows)
Option 2) - Google Hangouts on Air (Windows/ Linux /Mac)
Option 3) - Open source - OpenBroadcaster (Windows/ Linux /Mac)

The disadvantage of option 1 and 2 is that the only way to play the stream is using flash, and flash and HTML5 for YouTube (Google Hangouts on Air) AFAIK.

But other question is how to stream the OS/2 desktop, so online users can see demos? Since I have no idea, my only idea is to use VNC on the OS/2 client, and have a Windows machine to connect as "View only" to it and stream it as "Camera #2".

Is still a very draft idea and I have it tried it yet. Any other ideas are welcome.

Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Martin Iturbide on August 11, 2014, 06:51:04 pm
Do anybody tested if OS/2 desktop can be streamed with VLC?

Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: guzzi on August 11, 2014, 07:17:18 pm
For simple streaming just an old phone will do:
http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/how-to-use-an-old-smartphone-or-tablet-as-a-security-camera-104346.html
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Martin Iturbide on August 11, 2014, 10:03:56 pm
Thanks Guzzi.

I'm also checking the complicated stuff for a while. I noticed that VLC for Windows can open YouTube Live streams (https://www.youtube.com/channel/SBAaOjE-GIlRI (https://www.youtube.com/channel/SBAaOjE-GIlRI))

On eCS, VLC gives me an error and tell me to check the log. Where is that log?
Maybe I haven't configured VLC correctly, or it does not have OS/2-eCS support for this.

Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Dave Yeo on August 11, 2014, 11:52:12 pm
It looks like VLC wasn't linked against OpenSSL or similar and can't handle the HTTPS protocol and Youtube redirects HTTP to HTTPS.
It also looks like support for the desktop is missing as well, I'm sure it could be added by a knowledgeable person, same with the recent webcam support.
MPlayer should also be able to stream youtube but the same problem probably exists, lack of SSL support
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: guzzi on August 12, 2014, 01:44:49 pm
SMplayer does play youtube clips, so it should have SSL support. Never tried streaming with it.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: dbanet on August 12, 2014, 02:10:55 pm
Well actually, it should be relatively easy to setup a plain HTTP media stream (or two -- one for each camera) on any operating system but OS/2.

Then it should be very easy to watch this stream on any operating system including OS/2.

For example, I've been streaming a movie from my OS/2 desktop to my OS/2 laptop using VLC on both sides, without any apparent problem.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Martin Iturbide on August 12, 2014, 02:54:12 pm
Hi Boris

For example, I've been streaming a movie from my OS/2 desktop to my OS/2 laptop using VLC on both sides, without any apparent problem.

Can you give me some hints to how did you set up that to try it out?

Regards.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Martin Iturbide on August 12, 2014, 04:04:13 pm
It seems that OpenBroadcaster (Open source - Windows/Linux/Mac) is a  good alternative to make a "good semi-pro" streaming.

It has a simple GUI, you can set up an Scene, add several desktop apps to share (even one can be VNC connected to the speakers machine), you can add text and select just one audio source.

After that you turn on and off the checkbox of the things you want to show on the stream. Very easy to use.

Plus the best thing of all, is that it records all the stuff you stream in a local file on the HDD, so later you can have your file in case the streaming fails.

(http://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=469.0;attach=476)

Disadvantages:
* It is not a streaming server. It just selects the input sources and share it to a RTMP server. So to stream the video it requires to be connected to services like YouTube, Twitch or others, or you need to set up your own RTMP server.

This may modify my idea, but losing one machine. But I still depend on a rtmp service.

(http://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=469.0;attach=478)
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: dbanet on August 12, 2014, 04:12:23 pm
Hi Boris

For example, I've been streaming a movie from my OS/2 desktop to my OS/2 laptop using VLC on both sides, without any apparent problem.

Can you give me some hints to how did you set up that to try it out?

Regards.

Control-S on the server machine and Control-N on the client one.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: mickhead on August 13, 2014, 12:29:48 am
Do anybody tested if OS/2 desktop can be streamed with VLC?

I test this long while ago for good and not good results. General, Ustream is not good to stream with client like VLC due to difficulty parsing the URL.  Stream on VLC OS/2 sometime work, sometime not so.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Martin Iturbide on September 12, 2014, 08:00:32 pm
I tried Open Broadcaster againts YouTube and I can not make it stream :(

The other option that seems very easy is using "LiveStream" with a software "Livestream Producer" on Windows.

I have this test of livestreaming, but it seems that the users requires free registration to watch them.
https://new.livestream.com/accounts/9977563/events/3383103

Regards.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: guzzi on September 12, 2014, 08:57:17 pm
ffserver can stream audio and video. Input is an ffmpeg stream.
https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffserver.html
http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/download/pub/os2/apps/mmedia/ffmpeg-os2-r2_5_1-Fourier.zip
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on September 15, 2014, 03:54:11 am
ffserver sounds promising. I have a couple of questions, though.

How can you get from the camera to an ffstream?

How can you relay the stream from the hotel internet to our server?

Does someone have this actually working on OS/2?
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Dave Yeo on September 15, 2014, 05:41:51 am
ffserver sounds promising. I have a couple of questions, though.

How can you get from the camera to an ffstream?

FFmpeg supports most camera formats and can remux to most other formats so ideally you'd just pipe the stream through FFmpeg to FFserever. We may need to use a file intermediately.
Of course the hard part is getting from the camera to the OS/2 box as we don't support many interfaces. I'd guess over IP would be the only way.
Quote
How can you relay the stream from the hotel internet to our server?
Don't most Hotels have internet access?
Quote
Does someone have this actually working on OS/2?

I've run the testsuite, though not in a while. I'll rerun it shortly. To be honest FFserver is not the most supported part of FFmpeg though support has picked up over the last year.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Martin Iturbide on September 16, 2014, 02:17:55 pm
FFmpeg sounds good too, but seems to be to much command line and without any easy way to switch from camera to screen.

For the moment I'm thinking more of livestream.com
Good side:
- It has an easy interfase for streaming the video and switching to the screen share.
- It has an easy website to visit for people to watch the stream
- It records the video
Bad side:
- The user needs to log on to livestream.com to watch the video
- The only way to watch the stream is from the website via Flash player.

Here are my tests: https://new.livestream.com/accounts/9977563/events/3383103 (https://new.livestream.com/accounts/9977563/events/3383103)

Please let me know any other alternatives (for any platform).
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Alex Taylor on September 17, 2014, 03:24:28 am
My project group at grad school here actually specializes in ICT & Internet based learning, videoconferencing, etc. We often do support for remote lectures, but we have rather a lot of specialized equipment for it. For point-to-point videoconferencing we have Polycom equipment which is probably out of reach for a non-profit group like Warpstock. For more ad-hoc video meetings we tend to use a mixture of Skype, V-Cube, Google Hangouts, or Opentok.

One of our subprojects is actually trying to develop an open source conferencing system using WebM and WebRTC, but it's still in the early planning stages only.

We often stream (one-way) lectures or presentations, but again, we have specialized equipment to help us. Our most common method is:

I'm not sure how useful any of this is to Warpstock, given the specialized hardware we use, but at least the general theory might be instructive, somehow.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on September 19, 2014, 12:33:58 am
ffserver sounds promising. I have a couple of questions, though.

How can you get from the camera to an ffstream?

FFmpeg supports most camera formats and can remux to most other formats so ideally you'd just pipe the stream through FFmpeg to FFserever. We may need to use a file intermediately.
Of course the hard part is getting from the camera to the OS/2 box as we don't support many interfaces. I'd guess over IP would be the only way.
OK, I get the IP camera part, but the file part doesn't sound like streaming. If we have to go to a file, why not just let people download the file?
Quote
Quote
How can you relay the stream from the hotel internet to our server?
Don't most Hotels have internet access?
Sure, you can use the Hotel internet. Then what software to stream to the server?
Quote
Quote
Does someone have this actually working on OS/2?

I've run the testsuite, though not in a while. I'll rerun it shortly. To be honest FFserver is not the most supported part of FFmpeg though support has picked up over the last year.
Let us know if you can get it to work.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Dave Yeo on September 19, 2014, 04:24:30 am
ffserver sounds promising. I have a couple of questions, though.

How can you get from the camera to an ffstream?

FFmpeg supports most camera formats and can remux to most other formats so ideally you'd just pipe the stream through FFmpeg to FFserever. We may need to use a file intermediately.
Of course the hard part is getting from the camera to the OS/2 box as we don't support many interfaces. I'd guess over IP would be the only way.
OK, I get the IP camera part, but the file part doesn't sound like streaming. If we have to go to a file, why not just let people download the file?
The file is unneeded but is handy as a buffer, eg allowing someone to pause or rewind their feed without affecting others if I understand correctly.
Quote
Quote
Quote
How can you relay the stream from the hotel internet to our server?
Don't most Hotels have internet access?
Sure, you can use the Hotel internet. Then what software to stream to the server?
Does the Hotel Internet allow uploading large amounts of data? 100 users watching a 1 MB stream is 100 MBs. Of course the stream can be tuned including using better codecs, connections and bandwidth limited
FFserver works in tandem with FFmpeg so FFmpeg does the encoding, muxing (combining the audio and video into a container) etc and then creates a stream in the format that FFserver accepts, then FFserver streams it to the client, see link at bottom.
Quote
Quote
Quote
Does someone have this actually working on OS/2?

I've run the testsuite, though not in a while. I'll rerun it shortly. To be honest FFserver is not the most supported part of FFmpeg though support has picked up over the last year.
Let us know if you can get it to work.

I ran the testsuite till I had to kill it to go to bed, transfered about 1/2 a GB over the localhost with a couple of MD5 sum failures. Never looked at the actual image but usually these are small errors that aren't visible.
The documentation is here https://ffmpeg.org/ffserver.html (https://ffmpeg.org/ffserver.html), would have to decide on a format but it's capable of most any from Flash to webm for using a browser or much more if using MPlayer or VLC or other media players on other OSes.
The big thing is its a unixy app, so all done with command line and configuration file. Ideally would be a front end to make it easy.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on September 21, 2014, 03:00:03 am
I ran the testsuite till I had to kill it to go to bed, transfered about 1/2 a GB over the localhost with a couple of MD5 sum failures. Never looked at the actual image but usually these are small errors that aren't visible.
The documentation is here https://ffmpeg.org/ffserver.html (https://ffmpeg.org/ffserver.html), would have to decide on a format but it's capable of most any from Flash to webm for using a browser or much more if using MPlayer or VLC or other media players on other OSes.
The big thing is its a unixy app, so all done with command line and configuration file. Ideally would be a front end to make it easy.

I found the documentation not useful, because FFServer is only a small part of the total solution. I'll defer to the people now on board for figuring out video sharing to figure out the system.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Martin Iturbide on September 21, 2014, 03:51:29 pm
Does the Hotel Internet allow uploading large amounts of data? 100 users watching a 1 MB stream is 100 MBs. Of course the stream can be tuned including using better codecs, connections and bandwidth limited
FFserver works in tandem with FFmpeg so FFmpeg does the encoding, muxing (combining the audio and video into a container) etc and then creates a stream in the format that FFserver accepts, then FFserver streams it to the client, see link at bottom.

That is why I like a rtmp based solution, when you can only have one connection to the rtmp server (YouTube, Twitch, etc) and they take charge of the users watching it. FFServer seems to work in a similar way, but we need to point the one streaming to that server and the users will connect to it. (it is somekind similar).

But as a dissavantage of it (YouTube, Twitch, etc) you can only use their website to play the stream with a flash player. I'm trying to find something that can be used with the web flash player and with VLC at the same time. And that works with VLC under eCS, but that seems to be hard.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Martin Iturbide on September 23, 2014, 04:25:28 pm
FFslit looks very interesting: http://www.ffsplit.com/

It run on Windows. But seems to be a very "good for free" tool.
It works very easy with twitch, and I had also configured it with YouTube Live, but it requires more tweaking.
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Martin Iturbide on October 31, 2014, 09:35:19 pm
Hi

During the Warpstock conference, I was using Ustream to live stream the presentation. I got messages that OS/2 web browser with the Flash plugin was not working and that users needed to use Windows, Android or iOS to view the videos. I was told that UStream site was giving some message that the flash version running (on OS/2-eCS) was too old.

But I just checked today and I can see a Ustream live video right now. Can someone else check it out? or maybe a streaming with the UStream producer gives other result that is not compatible with OS/2 flash plugin.

Regards
Title: Re: Audio/Video Streaming for Events
Post by: Andi B. on November 01, 2014, 11:42:24 am
I did not test eCS flash but what definitely does not work is ustream with my BlackBerry PlayBook. Ustream says flash is not up to date and do not let me see anything. But Adobe says it is. Needless to say that I trust Adobe more than ustream in that case.