As you may know, I’ve been streaming my monthly East CAC meetings through Livestream.Com. This is less than ideal because of all the advertisements that get tacked on to my videos. For a year now I’ve been looking for an open source solution to replace Livestream and I think I found it.
The solution is called Red5. It’s an open source implementation of a Adobe Flash server, written in Java. It’s capable of streaming Flash video out to clients from a Linux server and seems pretty battle-tested.
I mucked around with it for an hour or two this evening and soon had video streaming out of my own webserver. What’s more, I can easily integrate it into my websites, making it much more professional-looking. I can even use Red5 to record my video streams into a Flash Video file for playback (or encoding later). All I pay for is my hosting space and bandwidth.
I have found plenty of open source streaming servers out there but almost all of them required a special client piece to view the streams. Red5 is the first I’ve seen that allows me to stream video to an audience using Flash: an application most browsers include anyway. In addition, Red5 also supports HTML5 streaming, if I recall.
My only complaints with Red5 is its horrible lack of documentation and it being written in Java. Fortunately, there are enough resources on the Internet that I was able to work around the documentation issue. And I’m ok living with a Java version, though I might be tempted to test Mammoth eventually. Mammoth is an open source Flash Video server written in C++.
This Monday’s East CAC meeting will prove to be a great test of this new way of streaming. I’ll let you know how it goes!