Jaron Jones wrote: > I have a couple of job openings for Linux, Python and Javascript gurus. > The company specializes in high quality video delivery over IP networks. > Check out http://www.byutv.org/streaming/ and click on the first option 1: > "Move Networks" and check out our job postings at www.movenetworks.com. > Feel free to contact me if you're interested. > Lloyd Brown wrote: > You got me curious, so I took a look at the streaming link off of > byutv.org that said "powered by Move Networks", and got this message: > > >> We're sorry, but only the following operating systems are supported at this >> time: >> >> Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista >> (i386) Apple Macintosh OS X or later >> (PPC) Apple Macintosh OS X or later >> >> Please check back soon for support for other operating systems. >> > > Now that I know that they're using Linux, at least on the back end, I > suddenly find this more ironic than I used to. That's what I get for > using Linux as a desktop, I guess. I tried playing with the user-agent > string to see if it was just some artificial limitation, but it tried to > install something locally, so I guess not. > Alberto Treviño wrote: > That's the great Linux irony. I found the same thing with Adobe. Last > time I checked with Netcraft they use Linux and Apache to power their > websites. Yet, they are slow to release a Flash Player for Linux and > hardly have any other native Linux tools around. > > KSL is another local irony. > I had an interesting discussion with some IT engineers and architects at the Church yesterday. Funny that this would come up so serendipitously.[1]
A friend of mine asked when the Church was going to support Linux streaming (and I had seen similar questions on various mailing lists semi-recently) which prompted me to ask around. After discussing it with a few people, a couple of things came out (quotes are my paraphrases): 1) "I thought they could already watch it with VLC." Upon further examination, there was some questions about whether it really could or not (because of the way the stream are accessed) and the legality of the method (they thought it required copying a dll from Windows into the Linux environment and/or ffmpeg which might possibly be violating software patents in the US). 2) "The user base is too small to support." There was a little of that "vocal but small minority" you hear about so often. Then we discussed how we had come to that conclusion, and decided we didn't really know how big the demand really was. There was some discussion about how to measure that (maybe a poll on http://tech.lds.org), but there wasn't anything conclusive that we felt would give accurate measure of church wide demand. 3) "The new system will standardize on VC-1 which is a public standard codec." There was some discussion about whether it really was open enough and whether there was an open source implementation. An assignment was given to research if there was. 4) "We might want to look at Move. The www.byu.tv thing is pretty good." There were some varying opinions on that, and since it didn't really support Linux yet (for the reason in #2), it didn't really address the issue. 4) "If it is easy and doesn't cost us much, then we should just do it." With the existing system it would be pretty difficult, but there is a project to upgrade to the streaming system working its way through the necessary planning and approvals. If/when that is approved, it sounded like a pretty simple thing to add Ogg (Vorbis and Theora) encoding. After this discussion, in an email, I was asked which codecs and players are popular on Linux. Here is the exact quote: "Could you give me some detail for a user subscribing to a audio/video stream using Linux (e.g. video codec, audio codec, common players, etc...)" So I thought I would gather a few popular ones from this list and maybe some of the FLOSS related lists depending on how it goes here and report back (so my own biases don't influence things too much :-). To get things started, some that I thought of off the top of my head that I think are popular are MPlayer, Xine, VLC, Totem (many of those (all?) are based on the FFmpeg libraries, which may be a concern, I don't know). Some codecs that come to mind are Theora, Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, XviD, DivX, H.264, and MPEG4. Container formats I think of are Ogg, Matroska, and AVI. Anyway, which players are popular and which codecs/container formats for audio and video would be most important for a company putting out streaming media to consider supporting? Thanks, Adam Augustine [1] Big fat disclaimer-> I am not officially representing the Church in any way. They may or may not do this. While I think the possibility is very good, I also don't want to get anyones hopes up to high. Don't hang your (or anyone else's) testimony on the IT department (or any other department for that matter) of the Church. -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
