How can I stream cross-platform video without using RealServer (Helix) and Real Player?
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04-07-2019 - |
Question
For years we've been using RealNetworks' Helix server to serve streaming video courses.
It has been a pretty reliable solution up until now.
As of late, our support calls due to RealPlayer issues has gone from 2 or 3 a week (mostly PEBKAC or firewall issues) to up to about 10 a day.
I've been arguing to dump Real in favour of something else, but I really need to put together a proposal.
Requirements:
Streaming, not download and play.
Clickable bookmarks embedded in the video (Real Text);
Able to handle about 100 simultaneous connections.
Able to recognize authentication from another server on the same network.
Constraints:
Small, free (as in beer) client/player (i.e. No embedded itunes!)
Platform independence of client/player (player must be available to windows/mac/linux)
What should I look for when evaluating products?
Solution 2
The solution to this problem was iSpring player.
It's actually a robust solution, with a PowerPoint plug-in that allows you to dump a PP presentation with voice-over directly to flash.
It also has a nice quiz component, which will submit xml results to the server so that it can be stored in the database. (Caveat - Not secure for exams, but fine for quizzes.)
They're promising HTML5 video any year now, which will get us over the tablet/phone issue when it comes out.
OTHER TIPS
You could do it the way youtube / google video / dozens of other sites do it. 10 bajillion videos can't be wrong, right?
Basically there's three main parts:
- Streams FLV or M4V videos over standard HTTP, can use any old webserver like apache for this
- Client is a Flash application. Cross-browser, cross-platform, everybody can watch it
- Seeking in the stream without having to buffer the entire video first -- this is accomplished with some server-side trickery. Basically if you are watching at the beginning of a 30 minute video, and immediately click at say minute 23, you don't want to have to wait for the entire thing to download first. So what happens, is the browser makes a request to like http://example.com/getvideo.php?id=1234&position=23 -- and then the server-side script dynamically cuts the video at the nearest keyframe, slaps a FLV header onto it, and starts streaming the video from that point. There are several pre-made scripts out there, I haven't tried it, but xmoov looks like a decent one.
As for your requirements:
- Streaming - yes
- Clickable bookmarks - you can do this with some flash scripting. bookmarks would be stored in a separate file (XML perhaps), along with timecodes, and the flash player would show the correct bookmark depending on the position of the playhead in the video
- Sure, can handle as much as your webbrowser can. Perhaps look into something like lighttpd if apache/IIS isn't fast enough
- Not sure what you mean by authentication from other servers. Need more explanation on this one.
Constraints:
- Yeah, player is free. Doesn't even need to be installed, runs straight from the browser. You can write full flash applications using only open-source tools. (some official ones from adobe, some 3rd party ones, depending on your needs)
- It's flash, runs everywhere (except for 64bit firefox on 64bit linux, but they don't deserve flash, they whine too much)