Hi, I have been casually following Red5's progress for quite a while but many of the technical conversations are over my head and, although I'm excited about the potential, I'm unclear on what, exactly, Red5 is and is not be able to do.
During my online travels, I came across the quirkiest Flash-video coding website you'll ever find, run by an English guy who calls himself Mr Webcam: http://mr-webcam.no-ip.co.uk/ Apart from the 16 live webcams running 24/7 (including his "World Famous Parrot Cam"), he cranks out little FMS apps and, more recently, Wowza Media Server apps (like Red5, Wowza is a Java-based media server albeit a proprietary, commercial one). Mr Webcam's website is visually crude to say the least and somewhat confusing but don't let that put you off exploring - it is fascinating to see the way in which he has evolved the various possible permutations of the basic webcam concepts and his enthusiasm for webcam technology is infectious. One of the Wowza apps absolutely blew my mind because, although he is using it as a guestbook, it has all the basic functionality I need for an altogether different use that I'm very excited about. The app is a simple video guestbook were the public can enter their name, flash asks for permission to send data from their webcam to the website and a video is recorded to the server and added to a list of entries that can be viewed by anyone: http://mr-webcam.no-ip.co.uk/wowza-tests/guestbook/index.php There is also a password protected page from which the admin can delete video entries: http://mr-webcam.no-ip.co.uk/wowza-tests/guestbook/index2.php Although you would think this is fairly straightforward stuff, I hadn't seen it actually done before, at least not in such an accessible form and, believe me, I have scoured the Web looking for something like this. MY QUESTION: As evidenced by the demo on his site, Wowza Server does a good job of handling this guestbook app - would Red5, in its current stage of development, be able to handle the same task reliably and efficiently in terms of memory leaks etc? Wowza's free license allows 10 concurrent streams (which, hmmm, I think, means I could have 10 people being videoed at the same time) - if I dedicated an entire server to it , roughly how many people could I expect Red5 to handle at the same time? The server: Intel P4 2.8Ghz 533 FSB • 2048MB DDR RAM • 80GB IDE Hard Drive • 200GB IDE Hard Drive • OS - Centos 5 (RHEL 5) • Bandwidth: 1000GB I would really appreciate any and all advice because, obviously, I'm in way over my head here but I really want to get my idea up and running because I think it will make a big difference to a lot of people. When I next get a free evening, I intend to work through the 21 Red5 video tutorials at flashextensions.com but, for now, you guys can let me know if I'm on roughly the right track. Thanks, Donnacha _______________________________________________ Red5 mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/red5_osflash.org
