Tom Marble's Weblog

Open Media Webcast?

So it should be fairly obvious by now that I live in GNU/Linux. And whenever there is a webcast I want to watch which is in closed format it drives me crazy -- especially if the webcast is hosted by Sun Microsystems.

And it should be obvious by now, too, that Sun has become a significant proponent of F/LOSS and ODF.

However it would appear we have more work to bring our communications team "up to speed". Ideal solutions might be running the Annodex plugin in Firefox or simply using VLC. It would seem that a popular open video webcast approach is Theora video, Vorbis audio in an Ogg container streaming from an Icecast server.

But I'm completely open to recommendations for best Open Webcast practices. Ideally you can give me some specific ideas on setting up an open streaming server which can, you know, be implemented fairly quickly and easily

All pointers welcome (PLEASE ADD A COMMENT)!

Posted by tmarble ( Nov 11 2006, 05:52:13 PM CST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Comments:

Tom, I think the Debian community has pretty much nailed this, no? Danese

Posted by Danese Cooper on November 11, 2006 at 10:33 PM CST #

You might want to look at the following things:

- Cortado Streaming applet for Ogg formats.

And yes it does work (minus the sound... sniff) with GNU Classpath and GCJ so you don't have to endlessly wait for the Sun libre java offering :) There was a demo of it two years ago at the alternatives runtime summit. Here is a funny picture of that event, see if you recognize some of the people there.

You can of course use other browser plugins or standalone programs to watch Ogg/Theora streams, but I thought this one was funny given your background.

- The Flumotion Streaming Server to create the streams from your GNU/Linux setup.

Both are offered under the GPL and there is commercial support from Fluendo. Fluendo also has some examples of demo setups: http://stream.fluendo.com/

Posted by Mark Wielaard on November 12, 2006 at 05:06 AM CST #