Posts tagged HTML

IP Stream: Hitting A Brick wall

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13 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.

Rave Live 2012 – Tom Glover

13 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. 
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