Tag: featured

How to do live video streaming

In this article i will cover live video streaming on the internet using Adobe Flash technology. Why would you need to do live streaming ? If want people to see in real time what is happening in a location , if you want to show to people a sport event or if your friends that are miles away from you want to see your wedding you will need to do live video streaming.

What tools will you need ? Well that depends on two main things: quality of the broadcast and number of people that will watch the live event. Let’s start with a high quality and lots of people that will watch the event. For this you will need:

A very good video and audio signal for the encoder . From my experience there are several ways to do it:

  • a professional camera with firewire works best or even better if you can rent a video mixer and use multiple cameras.
  • If you have SDI signal you can use Osprey HD capture cards

An encoder PC ( or laptop ) with firewire interface.

  • You will need a fast processor and a fast hardisk in it if you want to record the event for later use.
  • Install Adobe Flash Live Encoder (Adobe FMLE) . At the time i write this article the latest version is 3.2.
  • Adobe FMLE comes in 2 flavors: Windows version and Mac OSX version

A CDN ( Akamai , Edgecast, Level 3 Communications, etc ) or if you intend to broadcast yourself and intend do to this for profit you can build you own CDN ( this will be covered in another article )

If you buy services from a CDN you will have to pay on how much bandwidth your viewers will consume. And that can be expensive

If you have built your own CDN  you can achieve 20.000 simultaneous viewers with 1 core and 5 edge servers.

 

Setting up Adobe FMLE

Adobe FMLE settings part1
Adobe FMLE settings part1

Important video parameters are: Format to be H264 , framerate is also important ( i choose 15 or 25 ) , input video size should ALWAYS be greater or at least equal to the output video size.

For audio encoding . This is a little bit tricky . Adobe FMLE does not support AAC encoding by itself . You will need a special plugin for that.

And if you will target Iphone / Ipad and other mobile devices you will also need this settings:

Adobe FMLE settings part 2
Adobe FMLE settings part 2

 

 

 

Adventures with Cisco 7945 Phone

I recently got a Cisco 7945 Phone to play with.
1) I got it out the box , i connected it to my LAN and plugged in the power.
2) The phone started to send requests to my DHCP server . However it never stopped doing that.
Dec 17 21:54:11 localhost dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 172.17.1.13 from 00:1f:ca:ea:11:73 (SEP001FCAEA1173) via eth1
Dec 17 21:54:11 localhost dhcpd: DHCPACK on 172.17.1.13 to 00:1f:ca:ea:11:73 (SEP001FCAEA1173) via eth1
Dec 17 21:54:14 localhost dhcpd: DHCPRELEASE of 172.17.1.13 from 00:1f:ca:ea:11:73 (SEP001FCAEA1173) via eth1 (found)

3) A quick search on the net on how to set this phone up ( in the box I found no documentation so i guess google il my friend tonight ) revealed that i need to set up a tftp server to serve a software for the phone.  But to get the software i will need a Cisco account.

Great ( NOT ) … In order to download from Cisco you will need: “Have a valid Technical Support Services Agreement”

Now i have to wait a bit until my friend who has the account will download it for me. Time to get something to eat. This is going to be a loooooooong night.

Got the file. One big zip unpacked in tftp directory. Created a file named: XMLDefault.cnf.xml

4) got the files. DHCP server updated …

class "cisco7945"
{
match if substring (option vendor-class-identifier,0,32) = "Cisco Systems, Inc. IP Phone CP-";    #<----Matches first 32 characters
option tftp-server-name "172.17.0.1";
}

5) Press # while plugin the power and then “123456789*0#” to enter the upgrade sequence.

6) At this point the phone will request from tftp a file named : term45.default.loads

7) The phone is quite bricked. Requesting something via UPNP and there you go … another brick in the wall.

8) After 1 day of intense internet  searching  i found out that SIP45.8-5-2S was the the one firmware to go with. Worked like a charm.The firmware loaded as expected so the phone is now SIP.

9) Time to make it talk to yate. This is much more difficult than i expected. I have a small yate instalation here and usually i’m connecting to it with Xten clients .I added a number and a password for cisco phone ( from freesentral ) but at this point i’m stuck at registering. It doesn’t wat to register to yate.

I guess it will be at least another day of searching.