Coreix Managed Servers

Increasingly people are wanting to stream video on their dedicated servers. Of course you can use YouTube to host your video streams, which is pretty good and easy to do, but the overall video quality is fairly poor. It is of course worth checking out the other video sharing websites as the quality of video varies widely between sites.

Anyway back to encoding and streaming video on a CentOS 5.2 server. You can install using the RPM from rpmforge rather than compiling which makes life a little easier!

rpmforge is maintained by Dag Wieers and is where you can find many prebuilt packages,not part of a standard Redhat/CentOS install. You can find instructions for setting it up here. Here you can download the rpmforge rpm which basically adds Dags repository to your /etc/yum.conf.

So, with rpmforge configured, this was all I needed

# yum install ffmpeg

To encode your video file:

#  ffmpeg -i video.wmv -s 352x256 -aspect 4:3 -b 1200000 -ar 44100 video.flv

There are plenty of video codecs supported by ffmpeg so you can encode .avi, mp3, and .wmv and many others. Also there are many more command line options for ffmpeg.

Now all thats required is a flash player to stream the video in a flash format. You might want to look at the JW FLV Media Player. Just upload the player to your website, and embed the code into your website pages.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 11:45 PM and is filed under Streaming.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.