Advice needed - view stream + send offsite for archiving

[darianmiller]

Given a bunch of distributed clients locally viewing a MPEG-4 video+audio stream from their NetCams that reside on their local networks - we want to give them an opportunity to click a record button and then send it to our offsite location for archival purposes and viewing on demand later.

Using vlc it's fairly straight-forward to view the live stream from their Netcam. I can also straight-forward transcode the stream to a local disk file on demand (currently saving it as a .wmv file using vcodec=WMV2,acodec=mp3 and a mux of asf for later playback in Windows Media Player.) I was originally thinking to store the file locally and batch send them up via ftp or something later. But we'd now like to offer the ability to review the file fairly soon after it's been recorded so now I'm thinking, for the times they want to record, we should just to stream it over to a server on our end while they are watching it.

Streaming mpeg-4 video over the internet in a unicast fashion requires a pretty decent connection on both ends, with our end requiring major throughput to handle a bunch of clients at the same time sending us their video for storage.

What's the best setup for this? Should I stick with non-streaming file transfer methods to post the recorded video to the archival server? Will VLC be able to handle the server side? How to allow multiple clients sending to the same server and be able to distinguish the files received? Should a streaming server like Darwin be used instead?

Anyone else out there doing something like this?

tia,

Darian

[darianmiller]

No takers? I know there's some video storage server rental places that might be a good spot to dump all this video, but just wondering how people are handling it now. I can't imagine streaming it over the net in real time as I have no idea how many unicast broadcast sessions would be happening at the same time..