I'm not sure of any way to do this, so maybe you guys have an idea.

I have a video file on a server and I want to sync it's playing across all the viewers - a "broadcast" if you will, except from the server instead of from the location. Any way to do this with standard stuff and me not investing in Wowza or Flash Server?

2/3/2011 2:05:44 PM

If it's a Windows Server, or if you have shell access to it as a linux server, yes you can setup a streaming service. There's lots and lots of options to do this, both paid and free.

If you are on a shared host, check to see if they have an installable streaming package, otherwise probably not.

2/3/2011 4:07:35 PM

I was going to put it on s3, but I've got a couple dedicated that can be tasked with it.

What packages are you referring to on the non-windows front (CentOS and I think there's one Ubuntu server floating around with a 20Mbit connection)

2/3/2011 4:10:00 PM

doesn't VLC do this?



I'm more familiar with windows media services, but I'm pretty sure the linux packages of VLC do streaming right out of the box

2/3/2011 7:13:13 PM

.... from the command line? I'll have to investigate further.

2/3/2011 7:21:53 PM

will this be within a lan or across wan?

2/3/2011 8:06:46 PM

You can use fancy javascript/html5 stuff to do this.

Wowza was opensource last i checked...

[Edited on February 3, 2011 at 8:53 PM. Reason : ]

2/3/2011 8:53:08 PM

^ no you cant


unless something has changed in the past 2 weeks, the HTML video spec doesn't support streaming video yet... and you still need a backend serving it up to handle the requests

2/3/2011 9:51:08 PM

^ you are not thinking outside of the box...

It's not about streaming video, if it's a static file. It seems like he's trying to "fake" a video stream.

He'd merely need an HTTP server that supports the range header, and just use some fancy coding on the client side to only request the portion of the video that he wants to request at that point in time.

This is more or less how a lot of those flash video sites work. They start downloading the video, but if you want to skip forward, it just requests the portion of the video that you seek to, and then starts playing it from there.

The difference is that instead of letting the user seek to the part of the video he wants, he's using javascript to seek to the part of the video he wants them to see at that point in time.

I know HTML5 supports this, flash can do it, it might even be doable by other means, but i'm not up on my web programming.

2/3/2011 10:01:05 PM

that's a lot of reaching around your ass to get to your elbow, dude.



he's not trying to "fake" a stream... he's trying to stream a static file. You can literally set up a server to do this exact task in less than 5 minutes (ignoring package install time)

[Edited on February 3, 2011 at 10:10 PM. Reason : .]

2/3/2011 10:08:32 PM

huh?

Are you implying something that thousands (probably) of websites are currently doing is not possible?

2/3/2011 10:09:36 PM

yeah but there's a big difference between a client-side plugin (flash) and client-side native (javascript) when it comes to something as complex and performance-heavy as video streaming

although, if i had more spare time, sounds like an interesting challenge to see how far one can take such a concept over traditional ajax web services

[Edited on February 3, 2011 at 10:11 PM. Reason : lol]

2/3/2011 10:10:59 PM

^^You have to be trolling, or you just fundamentally misunderstand how streaming video on the web works.


^this.

[Edited on February 3, 2011 at 10:11 PM. Reason : .]

2/3/2011 10:11:34 PM

^^ he can use flash to do it for sure: http://flowplayer.org/plugins/streaming/pseudostreaming.html

http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxMP4StreamingLite

It looks like the limitation might be that mp4 files don't natively have the right header/key-frame data at arbitrary points, and they get around this with server-side applets that inject this data.

flv muxed files seem more amenable to this type of solution.

http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/577-h264-video-streamingseeking-via-java-servlet/

It doesn't look like anyone is doing it, but it still seems like it should be possible assuming you have a server that properly supports the range-request header.

2/3/2011 10:42:01 PM

Maybe i wasnt quite clear. I want to basically multicast a static file from a linux server. That way all clients are roughly time synced, and i can use datacenter bandwidth instead of site bandwidth. The only thing asynchronous would be a short welcome clip. It should imitate a live broadcast instead of youtube.

2/4/2011 12:11:09 AM

Oh…

You should be able to use VLC to broadcast it to the multicast backbone.

2/4/2011 1:39:35 AM

Quote :

"doesn't VLC do this?"

2/4/2011 11:39:29 AM

Quote :

"yeah but there's a big difference between a client-side plugin (flash) and client-side native (javascript) when it comes to something as complex and performance-heavy as video streaming although, if i had more spare time, sounds like an interesting challenge to see how far one can take such a concept over traditional ajax web services"

Maybe in 1999.

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/destructive-video/

2/5/2011 9:25:46 AM

^I just ran that in firefox and chrome. Chrome had aliasing all over the freaking thing. Firefox was slower, but it looked gorgeous in the process.

Interesting test though.

2/6/2011 2:16:10 PM

Chrome experiments is a fun site but don't ever show it to someone as an example of feasibility




It is the perfect example of "Just because you can doesn't mean you should"

2/8/2011 8:20:14 AM