Audio/Video Streaming for Events

[Dave Yeo]

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.

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

Don't most Hotels have internet access?

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.

[Martin Iturbide]

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

Please let me know any other alternatives (for any platform).

[Alex Taylor]

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:

• Camera and presenter's computer both connected to a video switcher, which allows us to not only switch between the presenter and the computer desktop, but overlay one on the other, picture-in-picture style.
• Video switcher outputting its stream to a video encoder PC, which in turn streams it to our target URL, which is usually UStream. IIRC the encoder PC actually uses a hardware encoder box, but there are undoubtedly software-only options as well.
• The video is streamed lived on UStream; we sometimes also upload our presenter's slides (if any) to UStream and have someone controlling the online slides in sync with the presenter and the slides on their PC.
• The UStream page has a real-time chat interface which forwards to an IRC channel.

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.

[Neil Waldhauer]

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?

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 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.

[Dave Yeo]

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.

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.

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, 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.

[Neil Waldhauer]

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, 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.

[Martin Iturbide]

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.

[Martin Iturbide]

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.

[Martin Iturbide]

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

[Andi B.]

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.