I've been working on this setup for roughly 2 weeks, and for about 8 hours straight today, and I still can't get it to function. Needless to say it's getting very frustrating. I know I can't be the only one who's attempted this rather ostensibly simple concept. A simple Google search of the topic reveals hundreds of threads on boards all over the world who are struggling with the same thing, but while most of them have lots of questions, few of them have an answer.
Here's the setup so far.
Ubuntu Box (10.04) - VLC 1.0.6 - Transcode line:
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:sout=#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=800,scale=1,width=320,height=240,acodec=mp4a,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:std{access=http,dst=192.168.0.75:8080/file.flv}1. WORKS - Access stream locally (same Ubuntu box that is streaming it) in a separate instance of VLC accessing - http://192.168.0.75:8080/file.flv.
2. SEMI-WORKS - Access the stream from another computer on the LAN. I say semi works because it takes 45 seconds to a minute in order to load the stream, which is odd and signals that something is awry.
3. WORKS - I am able to get Flowplayer to play the stream when accessed from the local Ubuntu box pointing to it's own Apache web server by pointing Firefox to http://192.168.0.75/flowplayer/example/index.html (which references the stream at http://192.168.0.75:8080/file.flv).
4. DOES NOT WORK - If I attempt to access that same html file from a computer on the LAN, the player shows up, has the swirling logo for a moment, and then appears blank with just the text "flowplayer" in the bottom left. No video, no sound, just blank. Mousing over it displays the controls. I have left the browser open for upward of 15 minutes and it was never able to access the data. To make matters worse there is no error message, no message at all, it's just blank. Maybe it's just me but I find unhelpful or missing error messages to be my #1 annoyance found in programming.
So basically in a nutshell, I can get the Ubuntu box to load it's own stream both in a browser and in a VLC instance. I can get a remote computer over LAN to access the stream in VLC (but it takes a looooong time) and I cannot access the stream in a web browser.
Things I've tried:
mux=ffmpeg{mux=flv} . No apparent change to anything. Currently using no specified mux.
JWplayer - Using jwplayer I cannot get the stream to load locally nor remotely, using Flowplayer I can load it locally only.
ffmpeg/ffserver - Couldn't get anywhere with this.
Things I've not tried:
NOTE: I attempted a billion separate things using JWplayer and was not able to get any of them to work, so I automatically assumed that the cause was my VLC encoding setup. Now that I've learned that the problem may be in someway related JWplayers possible in-ability to do live streaming, it's set my debugging on it's head. So I've tried all of the following with JWplayer, but not yet with Flowplayer.
RTP - RTP confuses the snot out of me in VLC because there is RTP, RTSP, RTMP, and I can't find a definitive resource which really reveals the exact differences between how the codecs and how VLC uses it. I also can't figure out the exact command lines to do each protocol, and which players can handle each various protocol. I plan on doing more testing with this in Flowplayer.
Red5 - The downloading instructions on the website are either missing, or incomprehensible. Most sites say that the server is broken and harder to manage than a herd of cats, leaving me to believe that is a rather poor solution at best. I could be wrong, but it's hard to find many *recent* posts which talk about Red5 in a positive light.