On a happier note, tonight I figured out the last piece of the puzzle of my free media streaming project! I have paired the red5 Flash media server with Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder to create stunning live video, all ad-free. The total cost of my software: $0. It’s just what I’ve been looking for.
I began by downloading and compiling the red5 software on my hosted CentOS server. This involved running a few “yum” commands to install the necessary Java dependencies but that was little challenge. Then I walked away from the project for a bit and when I returned I could not remember how to start red5. After a few more Googles, I discovered red5 had to be started from the /usr/lib/red5 directory on my server.
The next hurdle was opening the firewall on my hosted server just enough to get the media server working. Once that was done, I had some client issues to work through. The snazzy USB webcam I got for Christmas would feed video in to the red5 sample “publisher” Flash application, but under Linux it would not provide sound. I had to add the usb sound module to the list of loaded ALSA modules before Linux’s Adobe Flash applet could find the microphone.
Now that was streaming video through red5’s rudimentary publisher applet, I wanted to try some better video. I flipped my laptop over to the Windows side and installed Adobe’s Flash Media Live Encoder application. Not only does it work with red5, it is a native Windows application so it encodes better than a Flash applet. I was pushing high-quality H.264 video from my webcam and it looked great! I was even recording the Flash Video stream as I was sending it to my server!
In short, this is just what I was looking for. Now to flesh out a how-to document and share it with my fellow community activists. Every laptop just became a potential Internet television station!