Laurent Bridenne's web log about multimedia strategy, design, usability, technologies and much more... Multimedia

Tuesday Feb 27, 2007

We've been looking at Open Source solutions for live video webcasting over past month for Jonathan and his staff. Sounds like it would be great to endorse and pioneer enterprise-grade open source webcasts that runs on all platforms (Solaris, Linux, Mac, Windows, etc.). I'm not talking about passing proprietary data through Java, but a true-er platform. The winners? none.

We're currently using RealMedia for all live streaming. Quality is good for the bit rate required and plays on all platforms. It's scalable and sturdy but could be better with it's rebuffering and latency issues... The RealPlayer is also pretty cluncky/big to download and is not installed as a default on various systems. Most of the technical questions we get from live webcasts are users that do not have realplayer installed.

But Flash is bundled with browsers... either that or it takes a couple of seconds to download/install (versus RealPlayer)... that's why I'll be happy to test it going forward when the live quality is up to par or exeeds RealMedia. Just need Adobe to create a flash player 9 for Solaris.... and the server needs to run on Solaris too.

Vividas is the closest thing we could find in the open source world. Everything else has limited or zero support that may or may not run on Solaris (server-side) in a critical enterprise deployment. But maybe there's something else out there that's being the best kept secret in the industry... If you know of any, please let me know.

Comments:

I know I am going to regret saying this but does VideoLAN http://www.videolan.org not provide a solution to the streaming of video that would give you what you want. Certainly it works using Solaris servers and clients, as well as just about every client device. It still means a download and install of the viewer though so maybe that isn't any use to you.

Posted by Dave harding on February 27, 2007 at 08:34 AM PST #

Good point Dave. This tool came up... but yes... we do not want our Sun.com viewers to have to download something extra... will check into it. THANKS!

Posted by Laurent on February 27, 2007 at 08:45 AM PST #

Hi...I just met a new company who will be partnering with Sun in education markets called KZOnetworks. They focus on the content, but also run an open source flash server called Red-5 for their webcasting platform. I just provided an X4200 to run it. They are visiting Sun Menlo Park on March 8th if you'd like to meet them. http://osflash.org/red5 http://kzonetworks.com i also work with a video streaming platform called VX30. All Java, built in netbeans, "playerless" client. not open source though they may provide it to Sun. best, kevin

Posted by kevin on February 27, 2007 at 08:50 AM PST #

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