2009/3/23 Eric Gerlach
<egerlach@feds.uwaterloo.ca>
So... by streaming, do you mean live video? If so, the solutions the others
have given are fine.
Eric, I'm not sure how Kent uses the term "streaming", but just to clarify my earlier post, I don't use it to mean "live streaming" (streaming of video that's being recorded broadcast immediately while being captured). I just use it to mean "allowing the user to seek to parts of the video file that haven't been downloaded yet". Both streaming and pseudo-streaming allow this, though with pseudo-streaming, metadata (timecode, essentially), has to be embedded into each video file and the seeking is only as granular as the metadata. There are several free tools for embedding this metadata into video files.
Progressive downloading does *not* allow seeking in this way.
If you're looking to setup something "Youtube-like", where there are a bunch of
videos and people can watch them, you just need to embed an FLV player in
webpages. A quick Google turned up this:
http://flv-player.net/
The "Maxi" player looks decent. If you Google for "free flv player" or "open
source flv player" and I'm sure you'll find more if that one isn't good enough.
FlowPlayer and JwPlayer are the two big players (excuse the pun) in this area, AFAIK, though Xmoov is gaining usage. I prefer FlowPlayer because it can be styled without the use of Flash (you just need to use _javascript_).
The tricky bit of Youtube (other than bandwidth) is getting the videos into FLV
format. When someone uploads a video, you'll have to set up queued processing
to convert it to FLV in the right sizes, etc.
For this task, ffmpeg is your friend!
Good luck, Kent, and as I said earlier, please let us know how your project works out!
Best,
Sam