"Relaying" video streams

[Seth Cohn]

> I know someone at work who did just this sort of thing recently.  I'll
>  get details and get back to you.

Summary:

If the cameras are USB connected to a server then the best and
quickest option is to use an open source alternative to the Flash
Media Streaming Server. My research pointed to Red 5 for a good
solution. http://osflash.org/red5

Assuming that the cameras are IP cameras, which is common for most
streaming video in an open area, then the process is not as easy as
one would think. Using a combination of curl, ffmpeg, and ffserver, it
can be done. Bearing in mind, this is at the cost of having the server
rendering video in a continuous fashion so the box needs to be able to
handle the load. On the setup I did, I got decent quality at 8FPS for
about 5% usage of a dual core CPU per stream.

Basically the process is like this. A shell script takes the stream
(usually a motion JPEG) via curl and then pipes it to ffmpeg which
then sends it to ffserver for streaming on a dummy port like 8090.

If you're interested in this script, let me know.


>  On 11/18/08, Bruce Dawson <jbd at codemeta.com> wrote:
>  > We've got several web cams that people like to visit
>  >  (www.milessmithfarm.net). However, they're chewing up bandwidth when
>  >  more than one person at a time views them.
>  >
>  >  Is anyone aware of a Linux based video re-broadcaster (either software
>  >  or a service)?
>  >
>  >  We'd like to upload the video streams to a single server that multiple
>  >  people can connect to and view them. This way, we're only sending one
>  >  video stream up to the server, and the server can rebroadcast it to all
>  >  the connected clients.