Question

I’m almost there! I’m successfully pulling my MPEG-4 ES content from my SNC-RZ25N webcams and transcoding it to H.264 within VLC using a VLM configuration file. Unfortunately, my available outputs don’t include RTMP, so I still require one more step to publish to FMS. I am thinking of writing some code using the Red5 libraries which could accept data from VLC using either HTTP, RTP, UDP… whatever is simplest… and then publish to FMS via Red5.

I am not new to Java, but Red5 looks a little duanting. Has anyone used Red5 to publish via RTMP? Care to point me in the right direction?

Or if you can think of a simpler way….

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

First of all: Why would you publish to FMS if you have a Red5 instance running? This does not seem to make sense. Red5 is perfectly capable of acting as an RTMP server just as FMS is?

Anyways, I have an test installation running that takes a TCP stream of raw images, punches these through Xuggle (xuggle.com) and publishes them as RTMP streams. It basically consists of the hacked transcoder application that is a sample application in the Xuggle/Red5 adapter. This works with two rather severe problems:

1. The only usable codec that the configuration supports and that Flash wants is Sorenson which is inadequate for basically everything nowadays. H.264 just won’t work (fails somewhere in the FFMPEG configuration part) and VP6 is not part of FFMPEG AFAIKS.
2. There is vastly varying latency between the source stream and the Flash display of 2-5s. This could be a CPU performance or setup problem as it is yet undiagnosed. The target is 0 latency – read: As low as possible and definitely <1s mean and <2s peak.

I came across your question finding out if VLC can feed Red5 (so speak RTMP on the output side). This does not seem to be possible (yet?). So maybe Wowza’s RTMP server would be an option. They have a developer edition for “free” (as in beer) so trying it would be an option.

Good luck.