The VideoLAN Forums

Currently I have a cheap usb webcam plugged into a winxp laptop with my cable modem. I have tried various bunk solutions to stream video like camstreams and currently am using windows media encoder.

What I would like to do is to run software on my winxp machine that will create the stream and send it to a linux server that is not on my cable modems network. It is a server that I pay for (for webhosting, ventrillo, etc) with bluehost. From there unlimited people could view my stream without bogging down my small 42k/s upload bandwidth of my cable mode.

Windows MEdia Encoder would do this if my server was a Windows MEdia server, but instead it is a linux box.

The VLS flow chart doesnt really tell me if this is possible or not.


Webcam->WinXP running VLC------------->Linux server running some VLS application (no grpahical interface)<------Users connect here to view via a webpage or media player, or VLC.

Reading through the complex documentation it looks like I should be able to stream to http from my winxp machine. Then on my linux server access the stream and re-braodcast it out where I have tons of bandwidth.

Does that sound correct?

Yes, it sounds correct. (Now's the time when you ask "but how do I set it up?" :p)

Ha ha yeah! I can probably get it set up but I gave up on it when I decided that none of the "Transcode" options will allow it to play on a Windows Mobile 5 phone. My WM5 phone has Windows MEdia player 10 which can play most http and mms feeds as well as a rtsp player that can play some rtsp streams.

I have successfully streamed stuff with various webcam streamers like AbelCam and Tincam but could not get it going with VLC. I searched around on the forum and saw other people with the same issue but no solutions.

This should work for windows media player: You can then connect using "mms://<ip>:8080" (or "mmsh://<ip>:8080" using VLC).

Those settings worked great for streaming a file from my hard drive to media player in windows xp via mms://.
The settings didnt work at all for accessing the stream from media player in windows mobile 5.
The settings also didnt work for streaming a webcam to media player in windows xp via mms://

Might be that my webcam isnt what VLC wants it to be.

Does the webcam at least play correctly in VLC? (if it doesn't please paste VLC's debug output when trying to play it)