Re: Client/server (non-p2p) video

Sorry if I wasn't clear - just to elaborate what we're doing in Flash now and what we want to accomplish:

1) A "broadcaster" sends a video/audio stream to the server. (Publishing)
2) The server then does a one-to-many replication of the stream to clients who wish to view the stream. They can join/leave at any point. (Subscribing)
3) The server also saves a copy of the stream for later viewing. (Archiving)

The server does no transcoding of the video/audio stream, the protocol is basically designed so that when a new viewer wishes to subscribe to the stream, the server can fake a new header, and beginning at the next keyframe start sending the stream. 

A quick skim of the documentation makes it appear that this is at least possible now if the server pretends to be a peer, but I'd need to dig deeper to confirm that there's nothing in the stream that would require the server to do a lot more work along the way. (i..e if keyframes wren't easily detectable without decompressing the stream, or if it would require rewriting frame numbers to new clients joining, etc)

Can anyone with experience with the more low levels of how things stand now comment on if this would work without a lot of server overhead?

-- Kevin



On Mar 31, 2013, at 5:41 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:

> Indeed, #2 is a different use case, but the question that Kevin asked in the email that started this thread seems to be focused on solving #1.
> Silvia.
> 
> On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 5:23 AM, cowwoc <cowwoc@bbs.darktech.org> wrote:
> 
>     It sounds like we're talking about two separate use-cases:
> 
> Broadcasting a one-way video stream to many clients
> Using gateway as an intermediary for N-party video chat
> 
>     I am interested in #2 which isn't addressed by your suggestion.
> Gili