Posts tagged Media

IP Stream: Hitting A Brick wall

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12 years ago
by Tom Glover in

Today I’ve been working at trying to integrate the stream and its corresponding SDP file that Ravensbourne has kindly provided to me, this however hasn’t been as straight forward as i first believed it to be, my lack of knowledge of streaming also slowed this process down dramatically.

So to start with today I started with the obvious:

  • The SDP file in a RTSP stream – Testsed using VLC and Quicktime prior to JW Player, to test it was still streaming.
  • JW Player (Flash and HTML5)
  • Some patience
After reading some online information I installed the official JW Player plugin for WordPress, on the Penrose Market website. The install was fine and the test media I provided worked perfectly fine, the player loaded and it played the local .mp4 test file. The problems started when I tried to integrate the stream with JW Player, which could supposedly read SDP files and play live streams.

The main error I faced with JW Player was that it was struggling to find the RTSP stream, and in particular it was complaining it either could not find or access the SDP file which contained all the stream information. This tiny error took nearly an hour of more research before I found out why it would never work.
This handy blog post by the guy’s who make JW Player explained a lot about IP streaming and what formats and protocols are compatible with which devices and players. This section quoted below is the most useful reference:

Summary: Streaming Support

This table sums up support for the various streaming methods across devices and servers.

Devices Progressive Download RTMP/RTSP Streaming Adaptive HTTP Streaming
Adobe Flash Player MP4, FLV RTMP HLS, Zeri, Smooth
HTML5 (Safari & IE9) MP4 – –
HTML5 (Firefox & Chrome) WebM – –
iOS (iPad/iPhone) MP4 – HLS
Android Devices MP4, WebM RTSP HLS (as of 3.0)
CDNs (e.g. CloudFront) MP4, FLV, WebM RTMP HLS
Web Servers (e.g. S3) MP4, FLV, WebM – HLS

As you can see the RTSP protocol is only supported by Android Devices, as well as many Software Based Media Players such as Quicktime, VLC and Windows Media Player. I haven’t tested iOS 5 with RTSP yet, it could possibly work, as iOS uses a stripped down version of Quicktime and Safari.

This leaves me with two options:

  1. Embed either Quicktime or other proprietary plugin as well as providing a direct link to the stream as a back up for users that don’t have or cannot download the plugin.
  2. Speak to IT about recreating the stream using a more compatible protocol such as HLS or RTMP.

Anyway thats enough for today, I will continue testing various protocols, as well as other players such as Quicktime, HTML5, Silverlight and any others I find.

IP Stream: Making Progress

12 years ago
by Tom Glover in

Today we made some serious progress in creating an initial IP stream using a few odd bits of kit lying around room 906. The bodged system myself and Scott came up with consisted of:

  • 1 x Cisco DME 1000 (Stream Encoding)
  • 1 x Sound Desk (Tone Generation)
  • 1 x Composite Signal Generator
  • 1 x Picture Monitor (Live View)
  • 2 x MacBook Pro Laptops (Stream ReEncoding and Viewing)
The system became a bit of a bodge as we struggled to get anything other than Windows Streaming out of the Cisco Encoder, as a temporary measure we used one of the MacBook Pro Laptops as a ReEncoder to initially take the Windows Stream and turn it in to an H264 MPEG4 Stream, using VLC Media Player / Streamer.
This bodge wasn’t pretty or efficient but it worked, and it also worked throughout the building at Ravensbourne.
The next task over the next week or so is to transfer what I’ve found whilst playing with the Cisco Encoder and transfer my findings over to Tributary / Record Server 5. During the transfer we should be able to find a much efficient and simple system.

Rave Live 2012 – Tom Glover

12 years ago
by Tom Glover in

Welcome to my sub-blog about Rave Live 2012, or what ever it will finally be called this year. Today we started the project and looked into what is required for us to be sucessfull in the unit as well as the LIVE broadcast in mid-june 2012.

Today we found out we will actually be working towards two events, one test event in November 2011 and the other main event in June 2012. We also decided on our roles for the events, I 1/2 decided and was 1/2 allocated the Head of Interactive Media, which mainly entails creating IP Steams, Social Media and other cool interactive items.

IP Streams

My first big challenge is going to be getting my head around IP Streams and hows they integrate with HTML and the rest of the Broadcast Transmission Chain.

Today I started playing around with Quicktime Broadcaster for Mac OS X and my inbuilt iSight Webcam as the live video source. Thing started off smoothly, until my mac crashed. I did manage to get a low quality stream to Quicktime to my Windows PC but this was very limited in performance Maxing out at 15frames per second and for only short bursts (10-15 Seconds before crashing the Mac), which made it pretty useless.

Initial Todo List for the November Event

  • Look into other Encoders and Streaming Servers
  • Look into what is already available at Rave to Stream
  • Look into how to link into the Rave Transmission Chain
  • Create a Dynamic Website with Customised Content, by the Exhibitors
  • Link Social Media into the Website
  • Combine the Stream and the Website
  • Possibly add mobile compatible Website/Stream. 

Stickaid 2011

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12 years ago
by Tom Glover in
Stickaid2011

Stickaid2011

This weekend has been a very long yet fun weekend working on Stickaid 2011 with SilverLine Media, at Ravensbourne University, North Greenwich. Stickaid is a 24 hour broadcast streamed live onto Stickam.com and Youtube.com and this year it came from Ravensbourne, with the help of SilverLine providing the stream and many Ravensbourne students filling rolls from Camera Operators to Sound Supervisors to Editing and many more. The students that helped out over the weekend came from all year groups with some only 3 day’s into there courses.

Scott and Russell from Fluxity were originally brought in on Thursday and Friday to rig the events lighting and power. This job turned out to be over complicated due to some poor planning and communication from all parties involved. The rig should have taken only 8-10hours to complete but had to be completely re-worked to overcome the lack of correct power and distribution.

At 5pm on Friday afternoon Tom also joined the frustrated rigging team to assist in finalising some decisions and to get the rig moving again. The rig was finally completed at approximately 11.45pm on the Friday, with only a quick focus and program to be completed in the two hours before the 12Midday Broadcast start. Programming was completed during the first couple of hours of broadcast by Charlie Fox and Scott.

Fluxity Lighting was kept on call during the event for power and other related problems, and we are very pleased to report that we didn’t receive a single call, and the system was stable and survived the full 24hours.

Scott, Tom and Russell turned up at about 11am on Sunday for the De-rig that was due to begin at about 12.15pm. Between the three of us we had all of the lighting power and staging out of the rig and Ravensbourne back to how it was, in just under 6 hours, in a very relaxed yet steady de-rig.

All in all a long weekend in which we helped raise over £17000 for Unicef. It’s not too late to Donate still, just click on the logo above.

Here’s what Elliot from SilverLine Media had to say about working with Fluxity, over this last weekend:

Scott, Russell and in the end Tom, helped us Thursday, Friday and when I honestly thought that we weren’t going to have the lights going or anything, 2 hrs before TX they made it all happen.  Thank you so much guys, especially for dealing so well with my screw ups and then the de-rig on Sunday!

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