I'm developing a web system that (among other things) will be streaming video content to a limited number of users. There won't be more than 20 users at any one time, and they may be viewing videos from up to three cameras. However there are some restrictions on the setup of the network the clients have which are making this an absolute pain, and I'm stuck on ideas.
The cameras will be directly accessible from the web server running the software. The software server will be directly accessible to web users. However the cameras will not be able to be accessed by web users at all. So simply throwing up a flash player pointing to the url of the camera feeds isn't going to work. I need to present the video stream through the website in a cross-browser compatible manner, probably through a flash player like flowplayer, but flash is by no means a necessity.
So what are my options here? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The web software is an ASP.NET/C# website running on a Windows server. I'd prefer not to run another program on the server, but in the (likely) case that I do, the software needs to be able to run as a service so that it can run after a server restart with no user interaction. Also, free and/or cheap options would be prefreable.
The cameras are along the line of the AXIS 214 (there are others but they're similar AXIS cameras) and outputs MJPEG and MPEG4 streams at 640x480.
So I found a cheap windows application called WebcamXP: http://www.webcamxp.com/home.aspx
It suits my purposes almost perfectly. It captures the AXIS camera's stream with no problem, and re-streams it (in MJPEG from what I can tell). It also includes a small flash front-end with no controls, which may be a drawback for some, but perfect for my needs. You can just grab the embed code from WebcamXP and drop it into the website. Nice and simple.
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I've built a webapp to host low-res proxies of our teams video files. The webapp is primarily for tagging and searching video. Additionally, I'd like to be able to play a random playlist of clips on TVs around the office. I've implemented this by "Casting Tab" to a Chromecast, and it works fine.
However, now I'm running up against the bandwidth limitations of my host. Latency and everything is fine, but to run a single TV's 2.5Mbps stream 8hrs a day for 23 days a month comes to about 207 GB/month, 20% of my alotted 1TB monthly transfer.
How can i build something that will "cache" these clips client-side, so that it doesnt re-download them unnecessarily? There are about 1000 clips. I'd prefer to keep it connected to my webapp via browser or some API endpoint so the RAND() stream of clips is constantly updated as people add to it.
Note: I asked a related question yesterday, and it seemed to fix my specific issue, but it doesn't seem to have worked at scale, so I'm broadening the approach a bit. Browser Caching of images and videos served via php query strings
Shaka Player has built-in support for offline playback, along with a pretty good API for listing offline assets, and removing them again.
This would require that you have your videos in MPEG-DASH format. Luckily Google also has a tool available for that. Shaka Packager can take your mp4's and package them for MPEG-DASH, provided the MP4's follow some simple requirements.
You could probably build something yourself using similar mechanisms to the Shaka Player, but it seems much easier to use Shaka for doing it.
I am in local development, wampserver and laravel 5.3
I use ffmpeg to convert video files to HLS (video.m3u8).
The quality adapts according to the user's connection speed. Youtube uses this technology.
I now want to test according to the bitrate but I am in local.
The video plays automatically in the best format.
Is there a solution to simulate a local connection rate?
Since you're sending data over HTTP, check out Fiddler. https://www.telerik.com/download/fiddler It has the ability to simulate slower speeds.
An alternative is to use a tool like Clumsy which can simulate poor network conditions at the network level. https://jagt.github.io/clumsy/ I've had trouble with it under Windows 10, but it seems fine under Windows 7.
There are commercial traffic shaper applications as well.
I like to use Chrome for HLS testing and throttling, this keeps my testing needs all one place/one application. In Chrome install the "Native HLS PLayback" plugin, this allows you to enter a m3u8 URL right into Chrome and play it back. Then open up Chrome's Developer Tools, go to the Network tab, and then go to 'Networks conditions' - in here you can do Network throttling and specify whatever download/upload speeds you want. This should allow to test/view your different bitrates.
I have several YouTube videos embedded on my website. I'm using the Jquery youtubeplaylist.js to load and play the movies. I recently noticed that the videos on my website stall and stutter occasionally. If I watch the same videos directly through YouTube then the videos load quickly and play smoothly.
Could it be the youtubeplaylist script that is causing the slow down? Or, could it be the fact that I am loading the video in at a custom size?
Also, does YouTube give preference to the videos played directly on their site?
I've seen the same problem, but there are too many variables to know for sure. It's clear that the nocookie player that loads from youtube-nocookie loads much slower than the regular player. Google has likely devoted fewer resources to this version of the player, probably because it garners less revenue to make up for the cost of serving video. Using the regular player, things do appear to be slower at times outside of YouTube, but that could be purely coincidental.
Having shared hosting or not shouldn't matter, since as you note the video stream is directly between Google's servers and the user's browser.
I am wondering if anyone has success with audio record (from microphone on the users browser) and playback from a web based app (Ruby/RoR)?
What I have found so far - I could write a flex/flash app which will record the audio and then have a server side like Red5 or so to receive and convert. This sounds more involved and I also saw different types of hosting issues etc people are having - so I am thinking there may be better/easier solutions out there!! I looked at html5/web-kit too but seems to only works on chrome and is limited to text fields etc.
In my app, i want to record users voice, save it on a aws/s3 as mp3 or similar file format and play it back to user within the app based on users input/choice. While flash based solution is workable for now, non-flash based solution will be preferred as it will support more devices (you know devices I am referring)..
The only options for web based record are Flash, Silverlight or Java. None of these will work on an iPhone or iPad - You will need a native app for that.
You don't need to use Red5 for Flash recording - you can record direct to memory, optionally encode (or zip), and then upload the the data. You might be better doing mp3 encoding server-side using ffmpeg or SoX before moving the file to s3.
There is a way using HTML5 and a server. Just record a video.
Convert the video to audio, then use the audio as you wish.
This implementation takes audio from a video and runs
ffmpeg to extract the audio:
http://goo.gl/A0bya
This is in PHP, but it should not be too
hard to create a Ruby version. Easy peasy.
My question is similar to this question. I want to capture and modify video stream from web camera in Windows transparently to all applications using web camera. Whether should it be some kind of driver? Is it possible? Is there API for such tasks? I'm reading about DirectShow filters. Am I on the right direction?
Thanks for your help!
You can use DirectShow to capture the video stream from the camera, modify it, and then pass it on to either a DirectShow source filter (will be seen by some apps as "webcam") or to a kernel driver (will be seen by pretty much every app). If you're new to this do realize this is a lot of work. Depending on what you want to do, consider buying ready made components for your developing environment or even complete applications that can do this (I developed one).