Streaming via an intermediary server.

[Aristoc]

Hi there. I have a friend who has loaned me the use of one of his servers. It is very high speed and can handle a number of connections, it is a linux based shell account with vlc installed and setup ready to go.

What i'm looking to do is stream video from my machine at home to the server, and have the server multicast it to some other friends. This is for a webcam I am setting up, but the webcam needs to be pretty much in realtime. My upstream max is 40k/s, but bare in mind that this would just be one stream up to the serevr.

I have the streaming working on my end, but i'm unsure how to setup this kind of thing with the server. How can i have vlc on the server receive the stream and simultaneously multicast it out? I am very new to vlc and have tried to look for some guides on such a setup but am unable to find any.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated, even if you just point me in the direction of the appropriate documentation.

Aristoc

[LaBay]

Hi,
"40k/s" - ??? Kilobit? KiloByte? What kind of webcam? Have you something like Device Driver for your webcam on your PC?
Answer depends of that information.

[Aristoc]

Hi,
"40k/s" - ??? Kilobit? KiloByte? What kind of webcam? Have you something like Device Driver for your webcam on your PC?
Answer depends of that information.

Okay, the upstream of the source computer is 40KB/s... kilobytes a second... the upstream of the server i'm not so sure of but it is a dedicated host on an extremely fast connection... the webcam is actually a fuji digital camera in pc cam mode. I don't mind reducing the size of the feed so that it gets there decently enough, so the resolution isn't really at issue... it's the concept of actually streming -> receiving -> streaming out to the internet.

I am running gentoo linux on my desktop (source) computer and the driver for the cam is all setup and functional. I can open vlc and stream the cam to a second machine.

John

[LaBay]

VLC 0.8.6f
Video Source 640x480 25 fr/s
Local comp.:
1) input: -vvv dshow:// :dshow-vdev="Your Webcam Driver"
2) output: :sout=#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=192,scale=0.5}:duplicate{dst=display,dst=std{access=http,mux=ts,dst=IPofYourLocalComp:PortForStreaming}}

MediaServer:
1) input: -vvv http://IPofYourLocalComp:PortForStreaming
2) output: :sout=#transcode{vcodec=DIV3,vb=256,scale=1}:duplicate{dst=display,dst=std{access=mmsh,mux=asfh,dst=IPofYourMediaServer:PortForBroadcast}}

Your clients(spectators) have to start WMP and open URL mms://IPofYourMediaServer:PortForBroadcast
Client video 320x240 25 fr/s

[Aristoc]

Awesome. I had been making the mistake of streaming direct to the media server instead of connecting from the media server to my home machine. I will need to setup some port re-directs as i'm NAT'd, but that shouldn't be a problem at all.

Cheers,

Astoc