How "enterprise ready" is VLC?

[chaplic]

Hi Guys

I originally posted this in VLMA but it's probably better here...

Not offence meant by my subject line, but currently I'm sitting looking at a propsoal from cisco worth £0.5M for some video streaming kit. Which is clearly a few quid.

It's some VoD stuff, some multicasting and some unicasting. In theory up to 3000 endpoints over a nice fat network with QoS

I've used VLC player myself and had success streaming (watching the last football world cup at work, yaaay!) but wondered if it is scalable to industrial use. Any references I haven't found.

Any firms specialise in consulting against it? I'm in the UK

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Well, if you want to do multicasting and unicasting, then VLC is ready to use for most uses and enterprise use. Some big company use it.

If you want to do VOD using RTSP, then skip VLC (or use the money saved on Cisco to improve it)

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

I agree with JB. The VLC VOD (RTSP-based) support needs some serious work, whole broadcasting is just fine.

That said, for VOD, you might want to use HTTP, which you can do with any off-the-shelf HTTP daemon, e.g. Apache, depending on your requirements.

[chaplic]

Thanks guys. I'm fairly relaxed about the VoD requirement because at present we just host videos as flash on the intranet.

Are there any papers or public examples of the multicasting side of it, i.e Company X multicasts to its 5000 employees? The potential buyers are very sensitive and typically follow the herd finding comfort in names like cisco, etc. So reputation is just as important as technical prowess, sadly.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

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