Jun 09 2009
Stream video in FLV format over HTTP using VLC
A while ago I rebuilt the video streaming solution at YSTV so that it used flash video. Not wanting to pay for Adobe Media Server, I opted to try and create my own, as it were. I knew that VLC could stream video so I set off to get it to stream flv.
Fortunately for me, the latest builds at the time of vlc could do just that. However, there was one minor flaw – If VLC was transcoding video and streaming it, every client that connected would cause VLC to start up another transcoding process. Not good.
Eventually I found a solution by sending video though ffmpeg first and piping the output into VLC.
The result of my efforts can be found on my wiki here.
The system described there has been happily serving YSTVs live webstream for almost a year now with no major problems – It even survived 150 simulteneous viewers (which considering our previous streaming solution died at 15, isn’t bad going).
I’m not going to say the streaming solution is perfect, because it’s anything but that. However, if your looking for a relatively small scale, cheap flash video streaming system, this should suffice.
Hopefully it’ll help someone, Comments are of course welcome.
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