If I set up a webcam from back home, and wanted to stream it on the Internet to my personal website so that I could get images of back home, how practical or not would that be?
The images would have to be super great, and actually they wouldn’t have to be real-time streaming, but maybe just images every 10-15 minutes.
Would that require billions of dollars and permission from the FCC or whatever, or could I actually pull that off myself? :-/
Sincerely,
Debbie
This wouldn’t be hard at all. Lots of people have done it. Even real time streaming wouldn’t be that bad. Getting a host with unmetered bandwidth is the important part. Dotblock has been good to me and friends, but there are others. I know someone who hosts about 50 cams to 200-300 viewers at any given time on their $40/mo plan with expanded memory ($50/mo).
I don’t know of any 3rd party streaming software that can do this, but I’m sure it exists. If you want to go fully custom you could always get your hands dirty with Red 5.
How hard is that to find?
I would think that most web hosts would get mad if you were streaming video off of their servers?!
Do you, or your friends, do streaming video?
Can I ask what they are streaming?
So that is a development platform?
Sincerely,
Debbie
Not that hard, finding a good one is harder. Most hosts have bandwidth caps, Unmetered means you’re limited by the amount of output. Usually 100mbps is MORE than enough, but 1Gbps is always better (and harder to find). The problem comes in when you find out that alot of the hosts that offer Unmetered don’t have very good uptimes, which is important for a 24/7 stream.
There is also RTC which is HTML5 and a p2p connection and won’t use hardly any bandwidth… but I personally don’t like that because you’re exposing all viewer’s IPs to everyone else who’s looking at the stream. To me that’s an invasion of privacy. Last I’ve read is that the technology is not ready for having a server in the middle to get rid of this problem.
A close friend. I’ve helped him here and there with his site and been involved with a lot of the decision making, but I never touched the client or the server or any of the configuration on that end. He likes to keep it as a solo project. I just think Dotblock is one of the better production quality vps hosts I’ve seen, but like I said there are probably others.
Webcam chatrooms. Kind of like Stickam or Tinychat.
Red5 is an Open Source Media Server that works very well. I don’t think it does any of the client-side stuff, but it handles the raw data and makes it easy to receive it and send it back off to a flash client. It’s more for 2 way transactions, where I think you’re more interested in 1 way which it can handle… but there are probably better solutions. I just mentioned it because it would be a good thing to use if you were doing this for learning purposes.
If it sounds like I’m being vague, it’s because I don’t really know a ton about streaming, so much as I’ve just been exposed to it for the last couple years and have helped someone else out in a few places. I’m just trying to help you get pointed in the right direction. (I’m also at work, so I can’t do much googling to jog my memory. :D)
There are a million ways to accomplish this depending on a million different factors. The one thing I do know for sure is that you can do it fairly cheaply… relatively speaking. You’re going to use more bandwidth than a standard site, but probably not what you’re thinking.