Re: [Debconf-video] Live streaming for HTML 5

[Tom Scott <tom@tomscott.com>]

That's very shiny - and I'm happy to drop IE support, so the fallback wouldn't be a problem :)

I'd love to use it, but the one thing that concerns me is bandwidth: Ustream (and other, less ad-filled video solutions I didn't have time to investigate) will scale up easily and automatically - they can handle 100,000 users if they happen to arrive! It's the same reason I hosted the gamestate data on Amazon S3 - and I'm planning to migrate the online game command there as well.

Bandwidth is expensive; we had over 120 people watching today's stream at its peak, and even at 500kbps that's a steady 7.3Mbps. Scaling up from there is... difficult on zero budget :)

Any ideas welcomed, of course...

Thank you so much for the advice :)

-- Tom

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 23:40, Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:

Together with the DebConf video team and others I've set up live
streaming from several conferences over HTTP.  This was done using the
following software:

- Streaming server: Icecast <http://www.icecast.org/>
- Streaming client: oggshout <https://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31156&release_id=991>
- Format conversion: ffmpeg2theora <http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/>

Icecast and ffmpeg2theora are included in many Linux distributions.  The
oggshout client is my own (trivial) invention; there are other
compatible clients listed at <http://www.icecast.org/3rdparty.php>.

This combination uses Ogg Theora+Vorbis video, which is supported within
HTML 5 <video> elements in Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers.  For
other browsers it would be necessary to provide a fallback:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora#Browser_plugins>.

Our video sources are normally DV cameras but webcams should also be
usable with ffmpeg2theora.

Ben.

--
Ben Hutchings
Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.