I’m developing a web system that (among other things) will be streaming video content to a limited number of users. There won’t be more than 20 users at any one time, and they may be viewing videos from up to three cameras. However there are some restrictions on the setup of the network the clients have which are making this an absolute pain, and I’m stuck on ideas.
The cameras will be directly accessible from the web server running the software. The software server will be directly accessible to web users. However the cameras will not be able to be accessed by web users at all. So simply throwing up a flash player pointing to the url of the camera feeds isn’t going to work. I need to present the video stream through the website in a cross-browser compatible manner, probably through a flash player like flowplayer, but flash is by no means a necessity.
So what are my options here? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The web software is an ASP.NET/C# website running on a Windows server. I’d prefer not to run another program on the server, but in the (likely) case that I do, the software needs to be able to run as a service so that it can run after a server restart with no user interaction. Also, free and/or cheap options would be prefreable.
The cameras are along the line of the AXIS 214 (there are others but they’re similar AXIS cameras) and outputs MJPEG and MPEG4 streams at 640×480.
So I found a cheap windows application called WebcamXP: http://www.webcamxp.com/home.aspx
It suits my purposes almost perfectly. It captures the AXIS camera’s stream with no problem, and re-streams it (in MJPEG from what I can tell). It also includes a small flash front-end with no controls, which may be a drawback for some, but perfect for my needs. You can just grab the embed code from WebcamXP and drop it into the website. Nice and simple.