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This has been discussed before here. Using Java, I have developed my web services on Tomcat for a media library. I want to add a functionality for streaming media while dynamically transcoding them as appropriate to mobile clients. There are few questions I am pondering over :

  1. How exactly to stream the files (both audio and video) ? I am coming across many streaming servers - but I want something to be done on my code from Tomcat itself. Do I need to install one more server, i.e , the streaming server - and then redirect streaming requests to that server from Tomcat ?

  2. Is it really a good idea to dynamically transcode ? Static transcoding means we have to replicate the same file in 'N' formats - something which is space consuming and I dont want. So is there a way out ?

  3. Is it possible to stream the data "as it is transcoded"...that is, I dont want to start streaming when the transcoding has finished (as it introduces latency) - rather I want to stream the transcoded data bytes as they are produced. I apologize if this is an absurd requirement...I have no experience of either transcoding or streaming.

  4. Other alternatives like ffmpeg, Xuggler and other technologies mentioned here - are they a better approach for getting the job done ?

I dont want to use any proprietary / cost based alternative to achieve this goal, and I also want this to work in production environments. Hope to get some help here...

Thanks a lot !

Community
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zombie
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2 Answers2

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Red5 is another possible solution. Its open source and is essentially Tomcat with some added features. I don't know how far back in time the split from the Tomcat codebase occurred but the basics are all there (and the source - so you can patch what's missing).

Xuggler is a lib 'front end' for ffmpeg and plays nicely with Red5. If you intend to do lots of transcoding you'll probably run into this code along the way.

Between these two projects you can change A/V format and stream various media.

ethrbunny
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Unless you really need to roll your own I'd reccomend an OSS project with good community support.

For your questions:

1.) This is the standard space vs. performace tradeoff. You see the same thing in generating hash tables and other computationally expensive operations. If space is a larger issue than processor time, then dynamic transcoding is your only way out.

2.) Yes, you can stream during the transcode process. VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ does this.

3.) I'd really look into VLC if I were you.

iivel
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  • Thanks iivel, but I saw some notes on the community itself, that VLC streaming is quite slow and introduces some big latency. Still, I can go for it...can you please provide a more java based approach to do the stuff VLC does in my code. Thanks ! – zombie Mar 16 '11 at 18:12
  • can you please give some more insights over how to use VLC in my java based project ? I dont find any VLC APIs which can be used by third party developers for such purpose. – zombie Mar 18 '11 at 14:52