Dear all,
We have a requirement from an associate company. They are involved in
distance education over VSATs; they _live_ off streaming video. They
are quite tech-savvy in terms of using high-compression high-quality
streaming video.
This company is also very pro-open source, primarily because they get
huge costs savings and get freedom from the constraints of commercial
closed source products. They had a bad experience with a very expensive
(and highly regarded, I must add) Israeli distance education solution
at one point.
They are currently using Windows Media Player for the streaming video.
Their servers seem to be all running Linux, other than the Win2K servers
used for pushing out the streaming media stuff. At the client end,
they're stuck with MS Windows desktops because they need that Windows
Media Player. Everything else is being done using standards-compliant
protocols, e.g. HTML, HTTP, HTTPS, etc.
My reason for posting here is to ask you for alternatives for this
Windows Media Player thingie. I'll describe what they need, as a dream
wishlist:
1. Some open-source media streaming software running on any Unix/Linux,
which should be able to push out real-time MPEG4 data. If open
source is not available, at least free-as-in-free-beer streaming
server would be needed.
2. A streaming video client on Linux X-Window, which should be able to
receive this MPEG4 stream and show the video. If this client
software runs as a plug-in inside a Web browser, that'll be ideal.
Even a standalone viewer will probably be okay, if we can somehow
launch it as a helper application from within the browser.
Browser integration at the client end is mandatory, because the video
never comes alone... it always comes accompanied by text and images on
the browser. You read the slide and watch the video, and you become
knowledgeable and wise... at least that's the idea.
We're looking at Darwin from Apple. There seems to be a whole family of
products there, and we are still a bit confused about the licensing
terms (free as in free beer or free speech or what?) and about the
technology issues (does it need a Quicktime viewer on the front-end, or
will any standards-compliant MPEG4 client do?) Quicktime viewers are not
available on Linux; the only way people have been able to get it to work
on Linux is through WINE, something I'd rather avoid if at all possible.
We have rejected Real's technology because there are fat licensing fees
per stream. This totally upsets the economics of the service. This
business is able to invest modest amounts in one-time hardware or
software (e.g. MPEG4 encoding hardware), but they cannot afford
expensive per-stream or per-user licence fees.... that totally ruins
their economics, it seems. This is the problem with both Real and the
Israeli solution: per-user charges.
And they want to switch the desktops to Linux for security and stability
reasons. They'll operate through franchisees who will all have plain
vanilla Windows machines, but the parent company will supply them with
Knoppix-like run-from-CDROM versions of Linux which will temporarily
(and safely) convert the PCs to Linux desktops.
Any ideas about an MPEG4 streaming video server and client, preferably
free as in free speech, preferably on Unix and not just Linux, badly
needed. Please give me suggestions?
Shuvam
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